I’m surprised that people are surprised that this is where Facebook is going. In the words of my friend Richard MacManus, in reference to this interview with Mark Zuckerberg in The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg basically just confirmed that your feeds will soon be full of AI-generated content. Another reason the fediverse needs to exist: so […]
Read More… from “AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade
The web is full of bollocks these days, thanks to Google rewarding junk. Here’s The European Business Review, which looks like a legit publication. Not that you can tell from its website: As their latest print cover is on “AI”, then maybe it is only fitting that their website is stuffed […]
Read More… from Using once-legitimate sites to host SEO spam
First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal. Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 […]
From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon): Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that […]
Hernán Piñera/Creative Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0 My friend Richard MacManus wrote a great blog post in February on the passing of Clive James, and made this poignant observation: ‘Because far from preserving our culture, the Web is at best forgetting it and at worst erasing it. As it turns out, a website is much more vulnerable […]
Interesting to get this perspective on ‘Big Tech’ from The Guardian, on how it’s become tempting to blame the big Silicon Valley players for some of the problems we have today. The angle Moira Weigel takes is that there needs to be more democracy in the system, where workers need to unite and respecting those […]
Read More… from Being an optimist for a better post-Google, post-Facebook era
My friend Richard MacManus commemorated the 14th anniversary of ReadWrite, an online publication he founded as a blog (then called ReadWriteWeb) in 2003, by examining blogging and how the open web has suffered with the rise of Facebook and others. It’s worth a read, and earlier tonight I fed in the following comment. I […]
Read More… from There’s still a place for blogging—in fact, it might be needed more than ever