Fifty editors at Wikipedia ban Daily Mail based on some anecdotes

How right Kalev Leetaru is on Wikipedia’s decision to ban The Daily Mail as a source.    This decision, he concludes, was made by a cabal of 50 editors based on anecdotes.    I’ve stated before on this blog how Wikipedia is broken, the abusive attitude of one of its editors, and how even luminaries like […]

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A farewell to Tim Kitchin

For the second time in two months, I found myself announcing to the members of Medinge Group another passing: that of my good friend Tim Kitchin.    Tim passed away over the weekend, and leaves behind three kids.    I always admired Tim’s point of view, his depth of thinking, and his generosity of spirit. […]

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Online publishing: how the players we dealt with changed in 2016

Above: Brave Bison’s predecessor, Rightster, left much to be desired in how it dealt with publishers, while investment commentators had concerns, too.   Twenty-sixteen had some strange developments on the publishing front.    First, we noticed Alexa rankings for a lot of sites changed. Facebook itself went from second to third, where it has stayed. […]

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Building a car anorak’s encyclopædia

Above: The first-generation Mitsubishi Minica, though this isn’t the 1962 model. Now on Autocade—though hardly an iconic model. It’s the end of the Gregorian year, which means I get a bit of time to update Autocade. Since 2008, it’s mostly been a labour of love, and typically, the period after Christmas is when I get […]

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The big difference with the internet of the ’90s: it served the many, not the few

Above: Facebook kept deleting Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph each time it was posted, even when Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten did so, preventing its editor-in-chief from responding.   There’s a significant difference between the internet of the 1990s and that of today. As Facebook comes under fire for deleting the “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam […]

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Autocade reaches 8,000,000 page views; viewing rate up slightly since last million

I had expected our car encyclopædia Autocade would reach 8,000,000 page views this month, just before its eighth anniversary. The difference was that this time, I was there last Monday GMT (the small hours of Tuesday in New Zealand) to witness the numbers tick over—almost.    Usually, I find out about the milestones ex post […]

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Autocade reaches 7,000,000 page views, growing at its quickest rate

I was surprised to see that Autocade managed its 7,000,000th viewer some time this month, five months after the 6,000,000th. Considering it took three years to get to the first million, this means people are willing to use Autocade more regularly as a resource on the web. As something that started on the side, this […]

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Autocade hits 6,000,000 page views: a few quick figures

The Dongfeng Fengshen AX7, or a Renault with a Peugeot engine (and I don’t mean the PRV V6 or the old Douvrin), entered into Autocade this week. With Autocade hitting 6,000,000 page views earlier this week, here’s a quick anorak’s run-down on the rate of growth. In short: it’s about the same in terms of […]

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It’s full circle for style.com: back to its origins in fashion retail

Originally published in the online edition of Lucire, May 1, 2015   Top Earlier today, attempting to get into Style.com meant a virus warning—the only trace of this curiosity is in the web history. Above Style.com is back, with a note that it will be transforming into an e-tail site.   If there’s one constant […]

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Musings on making friends with mobiles

I see Google has messaged me in Webmaster Tools about some sites of ours that aren’t mobile-friendly.    No surprises there, since some of our sites were hard-coded in HTML a long time ago, before people thought about using cellphones for internet access.    The theory is that those that don’t comply will be downgraded […]

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