Google News won’t rank you top, even when you broke the story and have the best article

Techcrunch broke the news about Bahtiyar Duysak, the German who worked for Twitter who, on analysing one of US president Donald Trump’s Tweets, considered that he had broken the website’s T&Cs, and shut it down.    This blog post isn’t going to go in depth into the rights or wrongs of this. What it does […]

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Saving the internet from itself—Sir Tim Berners-Lee sees the same dangers

Above: The Intercept is well respected, yet Google cozying up to corporate media meant its traffic has suffered, according to Alternet. There’s a select group of countries where media outlets are losing traffic, all because Facebook is experimenting with moving all news items out of the news feed and on to a separate page.   […]

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Wikipedia corrects serious error after 12 years

Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years.    Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the ‘Ford CE14 platform’ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipedia’s inadequacies, […]

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When someone you know got ‘Harveyed’

‘Repugnant’ is a very good word, used by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences to describe producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment and assaults. It’s a small world when someone you know was ‘Harveyed’, and it all follows a very familiar script. My op–ed’s in Lucire today. You may also like History of the 2010s: […]

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Bye to the US news app that ranks the Steven Joyce dildo incident above Martin Crowe’s passing

I’ve just switched from Inside, the much vaunted news app from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, to Wildcard as my principal news app on my phone. I never got to use Circa (which I understand Jason was also behind), which sounded excellent: by the time I downloaded it, they had given up.    But we all need […]

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In the Empah, the royal baby is 8 lb 3 oz, thank you

The Cambridges with their new daughter in her first public appearance; photograph from the Press Association.   I haven’t followed the news of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s new baby much, but I was interested to note that when Kensington Palace announced her weight, it was in Imperial only. None of this foreign metric […]

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A year of random thoughts: 2014 in review

For the last few years, I’ve looked back at the events of the year in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. (In fact, in 2009, I looked back at the decade.) Tumblr’s the place I look at these days for these summaries, since it tends to have my random thoughts, ones complemented by very little critical thinking. They […]

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Reacting to AJE’s Broken Dreams: are there parallels between GM and Boeing’s 787?

Simpsons fans should be able to connect the above scene with the post below. I’m sure some of you watched the al-Jazeera English documentary this week on the Boeing 787, and how there are safety concerns over the models built in South Carolina. In summary, ‘Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit and reporter Will Jordan investigate Boeing’s […]

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Polarization in US politics: doesn’t that go against their idea of “rugged individualism”?

There have been a few articles lately on the polarization of politics in the US, where the middle ground—people with views from both Democrat and Republican sides—has been eroded. William Shepherd linked this one on Twitter, from the Pew Research Center.    My theory, sent on Twitter, was this: You are correct, and it is […]

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MH370: the simplest explanations are probably the best

I have followed very little mainstream media coverage of Malaysian Airlines’ flight 370, apart from National Radio. It seems that not paying attention to mainstream media has made me clearer about what might have happened to it.    All those way-out theories never held any sway for me. Or the idea about tracking cellphones or […]

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