Another nonsense “SEO” word appears on the web

I’ve noticed another nonsense word make its way on to the search engines: appkod. Similarly to how Semrush told users that jackyan was trending alongside Google SEO, there are weird web pages all over with SEO service appkod or similar combinations, such as Appkod SEO Agency and Instagram marketing Appkod. A Pakistani company has adopted […]

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After warnings were ignored, we now arrive in the new tech mainstream

If you look back at all the tech companies I’ve called out, deep down I did so as a warning. If they show this contempt for the user, then it’s symptomatic of greater problems. Everything from Google switching your ad preferences’ opt-outs back to opt-ins and the stonewalling when it came to deleted blogs, to […]

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The world is waking up to what Meta has been for a long time

I don’t need to say much now that the world is waking up. So what’s new? This was exactly where Facebook was heading in the 2010s. Appeasement depending on which way the wind is blowing. Principles? Look elsewhere. Zuckerberg’s only principle is safeguarding his wealth. I’ve said for years to simply shut it off. If […]

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How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web

I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats. Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, […]

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Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech

Computer-generated image of people at the Museum of the Future, photographed by the author. The people appear on a screen but in broken form, appearing as a collection of blue, lit pixels against a black background.

How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google. The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their […]

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Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?

Now isn’t that interesting? After posting about Semrush on their Reddit, where their error is laid bare for all to see, I have now had a blissful 48 hours where there were no new disinformation posts about yours truly pop up on Google searches. So much for Semrush claiming that it could not remove a […]

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If you’re still writing disinformation after all this, then tech is your master, and you are the slave

  If you peel away the technobabble of what Semrush said to me on Reddit, basically their algorithm messed up when it included an unspaced version of my name. It wasn’t trending. It was just an extrapolation made by an algorithm that, unfortunately, had a very negative consequence for me. But it also didn’t help […]

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Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?

Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost […]

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Fake news fuelling riots? The warnings were there as bots industrialize disinformation

For anyone who has followed my battles with bot-written and bot-based junk this year, this should come as no surprise:     The UK riots were fuelled by the same kind of website, with the same raison d’être. This one was in Pakistan, where, sadly, some of the disinformation sites about me have come from. […]

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Enforcing long-held laws: Google is a monopolist, violating Sherman Act s. 2

  Congratulations to the US Department of Justice on its first scalp in its antitrust lawsuit against Google, filed in 2020. Judge Mehta in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the plaintiffs in United States et al v. Google LLC that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly […]

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