The logical consequence of Semrush and its users’ misinformation: personal attacks

  This is the natural consequence of all the misinformation that Semrush encouraged its users to post through the crap generated by its Keyword Magic Tool: people attacking me on Reddit. And who can blame them? It could well look like I was behind this spam campaign, instead of being the victim. The deleted comment […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

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LLMs and Google could destroy the internet

Leigh Harrison sent me this blog post by Evan Boehs, which reflects my earlier ones about the web being rendered useless by Google et al. I never intended this blog to be about tech, but there’s so much to chart, and so much dishonesty to get on the record, lest someone else finds themselves in […]

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Online reviews: no safeguard against piling

There is a certain satisfaction in reading statuses like this:     But at the same time it confirms what I said years ago about Google My Business and its ilk. There are no safeguards for piling. Thanks to Google’s bugs, I believe my business has a listing but it’s been nicely messed up so […]

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“AI” is drivel

This is from Perplexity, showing how convincingly these bots with their large language models spit out utter drivel:     And not everyone will have the actual knowledge to call them out on it:     “AI” is only useful when you already know the answer, because it does get it wrong and you need […]

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Eudora users, welcome Aurora: finally, a modern, secure, Unicode-friendly successor

We have lift-off. For those of us who have been waiting for a successor to Eudora 7.1.0.9 from 2006, our patience has been rewarded. Some years ago, I had heard of a project called Hermes, and they have now delivered an alpha version called Hermes Aurora that does everything they promised. Back when Hermes was […]

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I’m blocking Threads

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 […]

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Semrush, your users used your tool, then created misinformation. How did this even come about?

It seemed right to quiz Semrush about the misinformation that is being posted out there, allegedly because of its program. I’ve yet to receive a reply, but I really need to understand why. How did my name even wind up in their system alongside Google and SEO? I emailed them, telling them what I could […]

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When anti-capitalists love billionaires

Ka wehi ta ratou kaupapa here, ko hiahia kōrero te reo Māori ahau.   People are waking up to how bad Google has become, if posts on Mastodon are any indication. What’s disappointing are the replies, usually saying they have switched to Duck Duck Go because it’s so much better, and others saying Kagi is […]

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I have business for the photo bots, but they don’t want it

We received a few more automated notices from Copytrack last month, and as usual we were able to show them the licences. However, this one involved one of our editors, and I had to waste her time looking for documentation from a decade ago. There are some other legal issues relating to their methods, which […]

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