It still surprises me that “the defaults” in life have the hold that they do. I tried a lot of computer programs when I was younger and found WordPerfect the best word processor, and to this day I use it. In the early 1990s, it was the default. However, it got there through fair competition […]
Read More… from Variety is the spice of life, so get away from the defaults
Beware Substack. I received a newsletter today that I had never heard of, so I unsubscribed—to find that I had allegedly signed up to everything that the user publishes. Not bloody likely. This wasn’t a case of being on someone else’s Substack and accidentally clicking ‘Yes’ to other suggested newsletters. Normally there’d only […]
Read More… from Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions
My dad made quite a few predictions, not because he was psychic (in fact, while he was never vocally against it, like Confucius he wasn’t a fan of it), but because he was a keen observer of people, natural phenomena, and the rise and fall of institutions. Off the top of my head: when Rob […]
Does this still work? Amanda and I were checking out cars last weekend and a sales’ rep tried to interest us in one by saying it was the top selling in its segment in Australasia. My first (unvoiced) reaction to this is: there are a lot of stupid people out there. If you can imagine […]
Read More… from A product’s popularity is of no concern to me
Sights on exporting: when we first licensed Lucire to a foreign country, in this case Romania, in 2005. Karen Carreño modelled, photographed by Yann Dandois. Mirella Lapusca and Valentin Lapusca created the Romanian edition. Over the weekend, one of the Lucire crew had to write to a PR company to be included on something […]
Read More… from Did you know that in the last three decades, media have changed?
Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool continues to wreak damage a year after Semrush users chose to write disinformation about me based on what the program said were trending keywords. Semrush later admitted, when I confronted them publicly on Reddit, that its system makes predictions as well, so we now know that what it claims to be […]
Read More… from Semrush users’ damage still felt one year on, thanks to Google ‘AI overviews’
Sadly, while these Autocade visitor numbers look rosy, Cloudflare does count bots, even if the bots go no further than notching up a “visit” on the system. No data are transferred to them. Fortunately, we have our page-view counter, and with every known “AI” bot blocked on our end, including a bunch that Cloudflare […]
Read More… from Switching things around: a post about bots written by a human
Richard MacManus’s Cybercultural I’ve mentioned as a must-read if you want to explore the history of the web. And today, Stephen Judd showed a collection of links, among which was this 2017 entry by Amy Hoy, ‘How the blog broke the web’. Hoy traces the origins of the blog back to a web diary (web […]
Happily, Curlie is back in action: I was able to log in without issue yesterday, and everything is back to normal. We definitely need human-curated indices on the web, sorting the human from the machine-written. Curlie (and its forerunner, the Open Directory Project) had forbidden content mills early on: sites that churned out only content […]
Read More… from This weekend: Curlie is back; ignorance must be bliss
It was sad to read of the passing of Ian Crawford, the former TV producer, whom I got to know through Lucire in his post-Crawfords career. I never pressed Ian about Crawford Productions and preferred to keep things on topic about his Pacific resort. It was out of respect as I had the sense (rightly […]