Excellent links by way of the fediverse today. First up, Cory Doctorow about saving the news from Big Tech, with sentiments that aren’t far off my own, many of which have been recorded on this blog. His post is from June 2023. Highlights include this on contextual advertising: In studies, these contextual ads perform slightly […]
Tag: Big Tech
We’re past the sort of digital marketing that some seek: the mid-’20s are about integrated marcom again
When I first started working, there was a profession called corporate identity. It wasn’t called branding. I noticed the vernacular change in the 1990s, more so in the early 2000s when even Wally Olins started using it more to describe what Wolff Olins did. You just have to follow the market. We’re at a point […]
You can’t contract yourself out of breaking the law, Google—that’s not how it works
Google has updated its privacy policy, giving itself carte blanche to take publicly available data to use for its large language models and “AI”. I don’t think whomever wrote the update has any comprehension of the law. Or that they do, but think they can get away with it. Maybe in their own country they […]
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Twitter tries hard to collapse itself
Things at OnlyKlans are worse than I thought. Sheldon Chang posted the following on Mastodon: If you can’t see his post, he writes: This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops […]
Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do
When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]
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Bing increases Techdirt’s results, saving it some embarrassment
After notifying Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, about my findings about Bing, coincidentally, the search engine began spidering his latest articles. It claimed to have 150 results, and delivered 92, many of which were repeated from page to page as usual. Tonight it’s a claimed 249, delivering 173. Techdirt is well respected and very […]
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An introduction to smart TVs for a complete novice
Earlier in December, we decided to put a TV into our guest room. One catch: there is no aerial there, so initially we thought, ‘We have some great DVDs, let’s plug in the DVD player.’ But it didn’t quite feel right. We’ve stayed at enough places with smart TVs, including some running the Android TV […]
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For the web, the glass is half full
Manu Schwendener/Unsplash I like what Robin Sloan had to say in his blog post, ‘A Year of New Avenues’. It’s typeset in Filosofia, which is another great reason to read it. I’ve often said the trends of a new decade, or century, don’t emerge on the dot. You’ve got to get a few years […]
Google’s advertising business is a negligence lawsuit waiting to be actioned
Apparently the New Zealand government says Big Tech will pay a ‘fair price’ for local news content under new legislation. Forget the newcomers like Stuff and The New Zealand Herald. The Fairfax Press, as the former was, was still running ‘The internet is scary’ stories at the turn of the century. What will Big Tech […]
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On the verge of a change for the better
I can’t find the original toot on Mastodon but I was led to this piece in the MIT Technology Review by Chris Stokel-Walker, ‘Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks’. As I’ve cut back on my Twitter usage, I haven’t witnessed any issues, but it does highlight the efforts […]