I might not have made it to London for the Business Book Awards 2023, but my mug did, as Panos: My Life, My Odyssey won a Highly Commended in the Business Journey category. The organizers were kind enough to include me on the screen as Panos picked up the prize for his autobiography. It was […]
Read More… from Panos: My Life, My Odyssey wins commendation at Business Book Awards 2023
I relayed this to one of my editors after recalling an old colleague we used to work with. He was kind enough to put me up once, pre-9-11, when I was on the US east coast. I was meant to stay with him for a few days and work on some stories together. I envisaged […]
It’s going to be very interesting to see the legalities of Google using the contents of 15·1 million websites for its C4 dataset, used to train large language models. Ton Zijlstra put me on to a Washington Post article that revealed which sites were used. He had discovered that his own website (zylstra.org) had provided […]
Read More… from Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?
The content’s ours, but that URL isn’t—and thanks to Google they’re still online A Chinese gambling site has cloned entire chunks of Lucire’s website. It’s not the first time this has happened with a bad actor behind the Bamboo Curtain; some years ago I had to ask a friend from Wuhan to intervene to […]
Read More… from Of course Google’s fine with running cloud services for known pirates
After seeing how badly Google performed with site:jackyan.com, I wanted to get on record how it was with Lucire. I already knew it failed to pick up many PHP pages, preferring the static ones of HTML, but I didn’t realize just how bad it got. I’m pretty sure it’s worse now than even two weeks […]
After the last post, you may be thinking: surely if my site was entirely PHP, Google wouldn’t have a problem identifying which were the most important articles? They are the biggest search engine in the world and all that data would ensure that they knew how to rank the dynamic pages properly. They would have […]
Read More… from How Google fares in a site: search if your site is all PHP—Wordpress users beware
In quite an unexpected about-turn, Bing began spidering Lucire’s website again, and not just the old stuff. A site:lucire.com search actually has pages from after 2009 now, and while 42 per cent of results still get repeated from page to page, there are actually pages from the 2010s and the 2020s. There are still a […]
Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good ol’ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. It’s why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Musk’s nostalgia. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what’s going on at OnlyKlans, […]
If you are a pirate, then GoDaddy seems to be the place to host. Last November, we spotted three stolen articles on the sephari.co.nz domain, which appears to be hosted by GoDaddy. I filed two DMCA notices, to no avail. They were in the standard format, one that GoDaddy requests and has acted on in […]
I have told this story many times: I became interested in fashion magazines with a 1989 issue of Studio Collections. In fact, it was its fifth anniversary issue. I really liked the typesetting, photography and print quality. I was probably one of the few people disappointed when they went to desktop publishing and the […]