Which club is the better one to belong to? The ones who have bent the curve down and trying to eliminate COVID-19, or the ones whose curves are heading up? Apparently Air New Zealand’s boss thinks the latter might be better for us. From Stuff today, certain ‘business leaders’ talk about the New Zealand Government’s […]
Read More… from If you’re in the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, then you’re not a business leader
After my last post, it seemed fair to give Google a chance to respond. I filed some feedback with them, and, surprisingly, I got a reply. But then I was taken around in circles, again, just like in 2009, though the respondents aren’t arseholes like ‘Chuck’ all those years ago. I clicked to claim this […]
Read More… from Google’s knowledge panels: they don’t know how to give access to a verified user
For a while, we’ve been thinking about how best to facelift the Lucire website templates, to bring them into the 2020s. The current look is many years old (I’ve a feeling it was 2016 when we last looked at it), which in internet terms puts this once-cutting edge site into old-school territory. But what’s […]
Read More… from Have we stopped innovating in online publishing?
Here’s a cautionary tale found by Lucire travel editor Stanley Moss. His words: ‘Photographer Dmitry Kostyukov recently experienced a rich dialogue with an algorithm belonging to a Scandinavian swimwear company. He’d been auto-mistaken for a Y chromosome, and digitally invited to become a brand ambassador. Dmitry accepted, and received the sample suit of his choice, […]
Read More… from Don’t rely on an algorithm to choose your brand ambassadors
Some of you will have noticed that Po.st went out of business, so all the Po.st sharing links disappeared from our websites. The replacement: addtoany.com offers a similar service without the hassle of header codes. Just customize at their website, grab the code, and insert it where you want it. It’s now on the […]
Read More… from Replacing Po.st with Addtoany, outside of Wordpress
When I first wrote a satirical look back at the decade, which ran on this blog in December 2009 (on the old Blogger service, as I was helping a friend fight a six-month battle with Google to restore his blog), it was pretty easy to make up little fictions based on reality. This one, covering […]
Read More… from History of the 2010s: a look back at the decade that was
I believe one of the Democrat-leaning newspapers in the US compiles a list of lies by Donald Trump. I really think we should be doing one for Facebook, as it would make for impressive reading, though it would also take some time to compile. Founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed he talked to media from ‘across […]
The latest model to appear on Autocade today: the Mazda CX-30. It’s March, which means Autocade has had another birthday. Eleven years ago, I started a car encyclopædia using Mediawiki software, and it’s since grown to 3,600 model entries. The story has been told elsewhere on this blog. What I hadn’t realized till today was […]
Megan McArdle’s excellent op–ed in The Washington Post, ‘A farewell to free journalism’, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. It’s a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a […]
Read More… from Why paywalls are getting more prevalent; and The Guardian Weekly rethought
Above: Behind the scenes of the Škoda Karoq road test for Autocade. I hadn’t kept track of Autocade’s statistics for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to see it had crossed 14,000,000 page views (in fact, it’s on 14,140,072 at the time of writing). Using some basic mathematics, and assuming it hit 13,000,000 on May […]
Read More… from Autocade hits 14,000,000 page views, and we start a YouTube channel