A Lucire KSA spread with a copy of Lucire KSA underneath it.

License from us, not from US

A Lucire KSA spread with a copy of Lucire KSA underneath it.

Anti-American sentiment harming sales of your licensed fashion magazine? We have a solution for that. We still provide US coverage but without being US-owned. But, importantly, we recognize that there are great fashion, beauty, lifestyle and travel stories the world over.   I have had to think a lot about whether our country-of-origin effect is […]

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Get your brand right and make it famous

There’s a lot of where advertising, marketing and tech have gone wrong on this blog, so what’s the right thing to do when you’re trying to sell your product? There’s the basic stuff we need to answer. We want people to buy our product, to solve a certain need, and they will do so because […]

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Civility and self-righteousness don’t mix

There may be a group of people today who are far more tolerant and accepting, their numbers increased by young people who have grown up in a far more connected world, and have been exposed to more creeds and races than their forebears. That’s a good thing. And we should, rightly, be intolerant toward the […]

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Another advocate for non-tracking ads

Again, not alone here, just ahead of the game (at least ahead in terms of public pronouncements; I’m sure Jon has had this in mind for some time).   Post by @jon View on Mastodon   With an excellent reply by Dan Seitz further down the thread (a direct quote since Vivaldi Social isn’t displaying […]

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“AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade

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 […]

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Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?

Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost […]

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To our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air

Above: Sunday host Miriama Kamo.   [Originally published in Lucire] To our colleagues at Television New Zealand’s Sunday, including Lucire alum Mava Moayyed, we bid you godspeed and good luck. Your programme didn’t deserve cancellation. This country needs proper, long-form current affairs, and with Sunday airing its final episode [on Sunday] night, this has come […]

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Do you really want a Nazi brand association?

Dan Gillmor wrote:     I share Dan’s view. Not only that, why would anyone want their brand—corporate or personal—to be tarnished by Musk and his simplified swastika? Yes, my account is still there, inactive (and locked), making sure no one takes the handle. That’s just prudent, because the one thing worse than having your […]

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Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?

It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]

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