I like technology. I don’t hate technology. But I hate what a bunch of idiots have done with technology. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the mass misinformation-authoring that used my name over the last three months, but, frankly, this level of technological misuse is everywhere in various forms. Take today, when […]
Read More… from To those who take technology and make life harder: you’re doing it wrong
I decided to block threads.net from my Mastodon account, which really doesn’t do much if there are determined bad actors, but it’s a small initial step to keep Meta in its place. Just as I never linked my YouTube account to Google back when I used those legacy 2000s websites, I really don’t need to […]
Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone […]
Read More… from Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?
It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]
Read More… from Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?
I’m afraid this says it all, and I mean it. We know Facebook is pay-to-play and Google is definitely heading in that direction. For some searches (try looking for a career coach), it arrived there a long time ago. In case Mastodon embeds go awry in the future, here is what I wrote: […]
Read More… from Google is warning us that they are pay-to-play
My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]
Read More… from As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social
This is why you should let an automated service post to Facebook and not do it yourself. I am reminded of this each time I try. I go into Autocade’s Facebook page and now have the extra step of having to “become” Autocade in order to post. (This came in a few years back.) Secondly, […]
Read More… from It’s harder for humans to add stuff to Facebook than it is for bots
Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and presumably Whatsapp) is taking user content for its ‘generative AI’. I don’t remember signing up for this, but then I stopped using these sites regularly. Allegedly you can opt out of this. I opted out of ad preference collection there and it made no difference, but in case it […]
Over a decade ago, I watched as Facebook intentionally broke organic reach and Lucire’s plummeted 90 per cent overnight. It was clear what Zuckerberg’s grift was: to get us to pay to boost posts. But there was already, back then, plenty of reasons you shouldn’t: it was buggy as heck. Fast forward to 2014 and […]
Read More… from States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans
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 […]