Bing has tanked

24.07.2022/22.02

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 […]

How to end social media censorship

16.04.2022/10.28

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 […]

That’s the hat-trick: Twitter has locked Lucire’s account

24.10.2021/06.40

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 […]

Chatting at a pro level on Leonard Kim’s Grow Your Influence Tree

21.10.2021/03.15

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 […]

Contextual targeting worked, so why abandon it?

27.09.2021/08.49

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 […]

Admiral doesn’t understand that I’m not blocking ads, only trackers

21.07.2021/01.38

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 […]

Nine years of promoting DuckDuckGo in Lucire

20.06.2021/11.27

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, […]

Finished replying to my 2005 and 2006 emails

07.06.2021/02.12

I’m not exactly proud of this, but last month I finished replying to all my emails from 2005. That year I was stuck in Auckland for an extra day due to the airport there being fogged in. I said to another traveller, ‘Well, I won’t catch up on emails now till the end of […]

Facebook goes even more pro-bot with change in group policy

02.06.2021/08.58

Why are there antitrust or monopoly laws? Why is the usual interpretation of the Chicago School really, really bad for the United States? Umair Haque’s latest post spells it out pretty well, in my opinion. Just an idea: let’s not import any of their dangerous ideas into our society, or allow their ever-growing giants […]

Classic example of tech firms passing the buck

04.05.2021/05.47

Just another day dealing with US tech firms then. When I signed up to Anchor, there was no mention of Google Podcasts, so I was very surprised to find later that I was syndicated there. Can you remove yourself? Anchor: ask Google! Google: ask Anchor! All that money (Google, not Alphabet, […]