Are you close to quitting social media?

Above: Just another regular day on Facebook: find more bots, report them, Facebook does nothing. A friend asked today, for an article he is penning, whether we were close to quitting social media on his Facebook (I realize the irony). Here was my reply (links and styling added). What are your thoughts? Are the big […]

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Trading identities in the 2010s: when corporate branding and personal branding adopt each other’s methods

Above: Brand Kate Moss was probably seen by more people when the model collaborated with Topshop. In 1999, the late Wally Olins sent me his book, Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies are Taking on Each Other’s Roles, a fine read published by the Foreign Policy Centre that argued that countries were trying to look […]

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There’s still a place for blogging—in fact, it might be needed more than ever

My friend Richard MacManus commemorated the 14th anniversary of ReadWrite, an online publication he founded as a blog (then called ReadWriteWeb) in 2003, by examining blogging and how the open web has suffered with the rise of Facebook and others.    It’s worth a read, and earlier tonight I fed in the following comment. I […]

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We need to change how we consume and share media as Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns us about privacy and ‘fake news’

Paul Clarke/CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37435469 Above: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Earlier this month, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote an open letter expressing his concerns about the evolution of his invention, the World Wide Web. (Interestingly, he writes the term all in lowercase.)    It wasn’t just about ‘fake news’, which […]

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Why Stephen Fry left Twitter, and what could be next

Stephen Fry wrote a witty blog post (he is the Stephen Fry, after all) on why he left Twitter. I won’t quote the whole thing, as it’s his copyright, but I will excerpt a chunk here: … let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to […]

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The Sunshine Blogger Award’s 11 questions

Holly Jahangiri kindly nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award. I doubt I’d win, as I don’t follow the rules. I’m not even entirely sure what I’d win. But the questions seem a fun thing to do, especially now that I’ve decided to minimize my time on Facebook in favour of the blogosphere again (roll […]

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I thought political division got you nowhere in New Zealand

A week and a half ago, I appeared on Back Benches to talk about Winston Peters MP’s “two Wongs” joke, and confined my comments to that.    My response, ‘There are still people who enjoy watching Rolf Harris, just as there are still people out there who enjoy listening to Winston Peters.’ And, ‘We have […]

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A belated look back at 2013

I must have had a busy end of 2013, as I never posted my trade-mark summary of the year as viewed via my Tumblr. Here ’tis, better late than never. January 2013 Lucire has a facelift online—by December 2013, this “new look” would be history. Kylie Minogue is on the home page as the first […]

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Upset about needing Google Plus to comment on YouTube? Here’s a radical idea: don’t

There were a few upset people in November because Google compelled everyone who wanted to comment on YouTube to have a Google Plus profile. Even a co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, objected.    But it’s been a long time coming.    In 2011, Google combined, as is its prerogative, YouTube accounts with its own. While […]

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It took Rick Klau to sort it out, again

In 2009, when my friend Vincent’s Blogger or Blogspot blog was deleted by Google, I fought on his behalf to get it back. Six months on the Google support forums, nothing.    One day, a friend on Twitter told me that with Google’s deletion of John Hempton’s blog, as publicized by Reuter journalist Felix Salmon, […]

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