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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘internet’
13.08.2022
Just trying to clear a few things off my hard drive. Here was one that was particularly curious when I was investigating what was going on with Bing: the files submitted by Cloudflare’s IndexNow. The theory: it would send Bing the newest accessed pages to add to the index. The reality: these are not new. In fact, these are ancient, many aren’t even web pages (they’re PDFs and web fonts). And sure enough, some did make it into the 10–55 pages that Bing is capable of indexing for Lucire these days—it’s a very tiny index in reality, regardless of how many results it claims to have for a given search, as we discovered.
In other words, IndexNow, as I saw it implemented, is a total crock, and not worth the bother.
I wish these companies would test these things first, but we are talking Microsoft, where we’ve been doing the job as unpaid QA for decades.
It does get worse. Looking inside Bing Webmaster Tools, these (below) are the pages it says it has for Lucire’s root directory. I’ve alluded to how bad it was earlier, but upon going through these, the main index pages, which Bing always had till recently, are missing. The home page is also missing (although when I first started investigating in July, it was still there, which a friend can confirm; and the structure of it has not changed other than the removal of some links to 404s). All that’s left are pages from the early 2000s, plus entries for pages that have never existed. You can check these against the Wayback Machine, but we have never had pages in the main directory called nguoi-noi-tieng, arts-culture, podcast, form-single.html, archivi or cv-generator. Yet Bing believes these phantom pages exist. Well done, Microsoft, you can’t even get this right. This isn’t how spidering works.
Tags: 2022, bug, Cloudflare, internet, Microsoft, technology
Posted in internet, technology | No Comments »
02.08.2022
We’ve hit 4,600 models on Autocade, with the Toyota Will VS taking us to this point, but the stats show we are sitting on 1,180,548 views. We have to get to 1,352,989 on the new count before I can announce we’ve reached 29 million page views.
We’re looking at the lowest traffic on Autocade since 2019, and I’m sure the collapse of the Bing index, taking down the indices of all associated search engines (Duck Duck Go, Qwant, etc.), is to blame. I used to see an increase of 100,000 every week, roughly, but not these days. (PS.: I was still observing this level when we first switched the site over, and the slower growth has probably coincided with when WorldWideWebSize.com recorded Bing’s plummet in late May–early June.)
Autocade is the one site where we never changed the set-up, other than hosting provider and Mediawiki version. The other sites had various things done to them, with Cloudflare and HTTPS. So given the “invisible” changes—changes we had done before in years gone by—we know “it’s not us, it’s them”.
I’ve listed the three Will models (or WiLL to use the original styling) as Toyotas after I confirmed this with another motorhead, the very knowledgeable Atsuhiro Takeda. They were also always listed as Toyotas by Auto Katalog many years ago, and I believe also by Toutes les voitures du monde. Atsu confirmed that that was how he believed they should be indexed. I’ve had those Will publicity images for a long time and it’s nice they’ve finally gone online in Autocade.
The only oddity in the Autocade stats is the rise in hits for our page on the Kia Morning (TA), coming from nowhere and into sixth place among model pages. Whomever the Morning fans are, I thank you!
Tags: 2022, Autocade, Bing, car, internet, JY&A Media, Kia, Mediawiki, Microsoft, publishing, Toyota
Posted in cars, internet, publishing | No Comments »
24.07.2022
Well, folks, here’s someone who’s done the maths. The stats in the last post suggested as much but the sample was so small.
Maurice de Kunder at WorldWideWebSize.com has a definitive graph:
His methodology is explained at his site.
I’d say late May or early June was when I noticed Duck Duck Go queries on Lucire become largely useless. After a month of seeing no improvement, I began looking into alternatives.
No one knows why, since Bing’s not going to admit any of this. If I was Duck Duck Go, I’d be looking into alternatives smartly. Anyone want to get in touch with Alltheweb and Inktomi? Their indices in the early 2000s were bigger than this.
PS.: I tried to tell the SEO sub-Reddit, but no joy. It was immediately removed.
The original text:
Since June I noticed that our internal site:domain.com searches powered by Duck Duck Go were not returning many results any more. As DDG is powered by Bing, I checked it out there, and, sure enough, we dipped from thousands of entries to 50 (and even 10 at one point). This is a 25-year-old site with decent inbound links.
I did a lot of investigating which I wrote up on my own blog (which I won’t link here due to sub-Reddit rules) and came across this website, which seems to suggest Bing has tanked. The person who runs it is pretty clued up on statistics.
I have run a small sample of 10 sites through the search engines as well and these back up their findings.
At this rate, Bing is smaller than Inktomi and Alltheweb in the early 2000s. What strikes me as weird is that all the Bing licensees haven’t done anything, either, so Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Qwant, and Onesearch have all shrunk, too. (Swisscows is still reasonably sized.)
Anyone else been through something similar in the last two months?
Why don’t they wish to know? I would have thought this was rather serious for an SEO group.
Tags: 2022, Bing, internet, Microsoft, Netherlands, Reddit, research, search engine, technology, the Netherlands, World Wide Web
Posted in internet, technology | 4 Comments »
16.04.2022
Kristina Flour/Unsplash
This Twitter thread by Yishan Wong is one of the most interesting I’ve come across. Not because it’s about Elon Musk (who he begins with), but because it’s about the history of the web, censorship, and the reality of running a social platform.
Here are some highlights (emphases in the original):
There is this old culture of the internet, roughly Web 1.0 (late 90s) and early Web 2.0, pre-Facebook (pre-2005), that had a very strong free speech culture.
This free speech idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet …
Many of the older tech leaders today … grew up with that internet. To them, the internet represented freedom, a new frontier, a flowering of the human spirit, and a great optimism that technology could birth a new golden age of mankind.
Fast forward to the reality of the 2020s:
The internet is not a “frontier” where people can go “to be free,” it’s where the entire world is now, and every culture war is being fought on it.
It’s the main battlefield for our culture wars.
Yishan points out that left-wingers can point to where right-wingers get more freedom to say their piece, and that right-wingers can point to where left-wingers get more. ‘Both sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.’
The reality:
They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.
That’s all.
They don’t care about politics. They really don’t.
He concedes that people can be their worst selves online, and that the platforms struggle to keep things civil.
They have to pretend to enforce fairness. They have to adopt “principles.”
Let me tell you: There are no real principles. They are just trying to be fair because if they weren’t, everyone would yell louder and the problem would be worse …
You really want to avoid censorship on social networks? Here is the solution:
Stop arguing. Play nice. The catch: everyone has to do it at once.
I guarantee you, if you do that, there will be no censorship of any topic on any social network.
Because it is not topics that are censored. It is behavior.
I think Yishan’s right to some degree. There are leanings that the leaders of these social networks have, and I think that can affect the overall decisions. But he’s also right that both left and right feel aggrieved. I warned as much when I wrote about social media and their decision about Donald Trump in the wake of the incidents of January 6, 2021. I’ve seen left- and right-wing accounts get taken down, and often for no discernible reason I can fathom.
Generally, however, civil discourse is a perfectly fine way to go, and for most things that doesn’t invite censorship or account removal. Wouldn’t it be nice if people took him up on this, to see what would happen?
Sadly, that could well be as idealistic as the ‘new frontier’ which many of us who got into the dot com world in the 1990s believed in.
But maybe he’s woken up some folks. And with c. 50,000 followers, he has a darn sight better chance than I have reaching just over a tenth of that on Twitter, and the 1,000 or so of you who will read this blog post.
During the writing of this post, Vivaldi crashed again, when I attempted to enter form data—a bug that they believed was fixed a few revisions ago. It appears not. I’ll still send over a bug report, but everything is pointing at my abandoning it in favour of Opera GX. Five years is a very good run for a browser.
Tags: 1990s, 2020s, 2022, censorship, culture, Facebook, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, history, internet, Reddit, social media, social networking, Twitter, USA, Web 2·0, World Wide Web, Yishan Wong
Posted in culture, internet, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »
24.10.2021
Pixabay
In the space of less than a month, another US social network has shut Lucire’s account down. This time it’s Twitter.
When going through the settings to see if Lucire could be verified, Twitter requested that we complete all the information. It specifically states that the date of birth should be entered, even for companies.
It only seemed logical to put in Lucire’s founding date, October 20, 1997.
That was enough to have the account locked. As we started the account in the 2000s, it stated we were under age when that happened.
We’re not sure why an event in the 2000s would have an impact in the 2020s, but more importantly, Twitter should have worded its request far better.
As a company account, any number of people could be managing it. It so happened that I set up the account, so I provided them with my driver’s licence as proof of my age—but that’s not the age of the company. What if I had assigned a social media manager in their early 20s to do the job? Isn’t it conceivable that they would then inadvertently lock the account if they put in their own date of birth?
Not even Facebook or Instagram are daft enough to lock an account based on a company’s foundation date. What other date would a reasonable person have put down when the company’s birthday is requested? The date of first operation? The date the idea was conceived? The date of incorporation? All of those would have fallen foul of Twitter’s systems.
For a company that made US$3·7 milliard in revenue last year, it does seem a rather major error.
After I noted this on my personal account, spammers and bots began replying—accounts that no doubt have been reported but are permitted to remain.
We remain in the dark on why Instagram locked us out and deactivated our account less than a month ago.
It is perhaps best to either lie to these US social media giants (in the case of some, it’s the behaviour their own leadership exhibits), or to not provide them information at all. Or, better yet, to not rely on them at all and to focus on one’s own proprietary web presences. It is no coincidence that with our redesign, we left off all social media links, ironically with the exception of Twitter on our home page.—Jack Yan, Founder and Publisher
Originally published in Lucire.
PS.: The title refers to the fact that all three US Big Tech players have locked us out at some stage. In 2013, Google blacklisted all our sites. In September, Instagram deactivated Lucire’s account. And now, it’s Twitter’s turn.
Tags: 2021, Big Tech, business, internet, JY&A Media, Lucire, social media, social networking, Twitter
Posted in business, internet, publishing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
21.10.2021
Shared on my social media on the day, but I had been waiting for an opportunity to note this on my blog.
It was an honour last week to guest on Leonard Kim’s Grow Your Influence Tree, his internet talk show on VoiceAmerica. Leonard knows plenty about marketing and branding, so I thought it might be fun to give his listeners a slightly different perspective—namely through publishing. And since I know his listeners’ usual topics, I didn’t stray too far from marketing.
We discuss the decrease in CPM rates online; the importance of long-form features to magazines (and magazine websites) and how that evolution came about; how search engines have become worse at search (while promoting novelty; on this note I’ve seen Qwant do very well on accuracy); how great articles can establish trust in a brand and falling in love with the content you consume (paraphrasing Leonard’s words here); Lucire’s approach to global coverage and how that differs to other titles’; the need to have global coverage and how that potentially unites people, rather than divide them; how long-form articles are good for your bottom line; how stories work in terms of brand-building; how Google News favours corporate and mainstream sources; and the perks of the job.
This was a great hour, and it was just such a pleasure to talk to someone who is at the same level as me to begin with, and who has a ready-made audience that doesn’t need the basics explained to them. It didn’t take long for Leonard and me to get into these topics and keep the discussion at a much higher level than what I would find if it was a general-audience show. Thank you, Leonard!
Listen to my guest spot on Leonard’s show here, and check out his website and his Twitter (which is how we originally connected). And tune in every Thursday 1 p.m. Pacific time on the VoiceAmerica Influencers channel for more episodes with his other guests!
Tags: 2021, branding, California, Google, internet, interview, Jack Yan, Leonard Kim, Lucire, marketing, media, radio, Twitter, USA, VoiceAmerica
Posted in branding, business, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
27.09.2021
Didn’t I already say this?
Contextual targeting worked for so long on the web, although for some time I’ve noticed ads not displaying on sites where I’ve blocked trackers or had third-party cookies turned off. That means there are ad networks that would rather do their clients, publishers and themselves out of income when they can’t track. Where’s the wisdom in that?
I can’t believe it took Apple’s change in favour of privacy for the online advertising mob to take notice.
This is how I expect it to work (and it’s a real screenshot from Autocade).
Tags: 2021, advertising, Autocade, IAB, internet, JY&A Media, marketing, online, online advertising, publishing, World Wide Web
Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
11.08.2021
Here are August 2021’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources
Volkswagen Gol G4—more at Autocade.
The fake friends of social media being the junk food equivalent of real friendships, from this post by Umair Haque.
Stay at home, wear a mask—geek humour shared from Twitter.
Thaikila swimwear—seems to have an interesting history.
More on the Fiat 124 Sport Spider here at Autocade.
Jerry Inzerillo, first male on the cover of an issue of Lucire anywhere in the world, in this case the August 2021 issue of Lucire KSA. The story can be found here on our website.
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2000, 2010s, 2011, 2021, actor, advertisement, advertising, Bali, Brazil, business, car, celebrity, COVID-19, culture, fashion, fashion magazine, Fiat, Ford, France, Google, humour, Indonesia, internet, Jerry Inzerillo, Lucire, Lucire KSA, magazine, Mazda, newspaper, Otosan, prediction, publishing, Renault, Sean Connery, society, Turkey, Twitter, UK, Umair Haque, USA, Volkswagen
Posted in business, cars, culture, gallery, internet, publishing, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
21.07.2021
It’s pretty bad that Admiral, which detects whether you are using an ad blocker or not, now advises this with Privacy Badger.
Let me make this very clear: I am not against advertising on websites. I have advertising on our websites.
I am against tracking by people such as Google. And that is all I am blocking: the tracking part. There is a difference.
Frankly, if you need to track in order for your ads to work, then there is something deeply wrong with your model. You’re actually doing your clients out of exposure.
This goes for the ad networks that work with us, too. If you have Privacy Badger installed and both you and I miss out on ads on our sites, then so be it.
What is so wrong about using the context of the page and delivering ads to suit? Everyone still wins with this model and we don’t feel as violated.
So I won’t be disabling Privacy Badger, thanks.
It also means I’ll be happy to charge a premium on advertisers who want to appear on our site because the content is relevant—and because the non-tracked stuff will at least get seen by an engaged public.
Tags: 2020s, 2021, advertising, internet, marketing, privacy, publishing
Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, publishing, technology | No Comments »
20.06.2021
Promoting DuckDuckGo: ‘Glancing back’ in Lucire KSA, June 2021.
For some time now, in every print issue of Lucire, and Lucire KSA, there is a mention of search engine DuckDuckGo. But I wasn’t sure how long we had been doing this, till I checked tonight. We started referencing DuckDuckGo in 2012, on our history page, where we look back at what we wrote 15, 10 and 5 years ago. What we do is feed in the year and Lucire, and let the search engine do the rest. It might not have Google’s might, but in my book it deserves considerably more loyalty, and all the help we can give.
Tags: 2012, 2021, Aotearoa, Duck Duck Go, internet, JY&A Media, Lucire, Lucire KSA, New Zealand, publishing, Saudi Arabia, search engine
Posted in culture, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing | No Comments »
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