When dead trees beat the internet

02.05.2025/10.30

Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’ A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better. If search engines had kept up with the game, […]

“AI” bots drive Wikipedia traffic up 50 per cent—as we already witnessed in 2023

02.04.2025/11.21

Another thing I experienced before others: “AI” scraping causing a substantial increase in bandwidth, notably at Autocade in 2023. In Wikipedia’s case, this happened last year, as the “AI” bots sent their bandwidth up 50 per cent. Casey Newton writes: Post by @caseynewton View on Mastodon The bots steal, do not give attribution, and […]

Online history lesson

31.08.2024/09.59

It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is […]

Reaching the end of Facebook

05.08.2020/12.02

With the new season of Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei nearly upon us, I decided I’d pop into my Facebook group (I’m still an admin) to see what had been happening. I’ve been there a few times this week and I have discovered some of the site’s latest features. Groups: these now have […]

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked

20.03.2018/09.14

Facebook’s woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even […]

Disloyalty programme, loyalty conduct

27.01.2018/10.01

P.P.P.PS.: Lumino’s head office has taken this case very, very seriously, and has been following up on Ezidebit and Goody. I’m actually really impressed—enough to add the two words to the title. They get that I’ve never put my cellphone number on an any app in the past, and they, too, know that the timing […]

I don’t do paid blog posts here (so don’t ask)

11.12.2017/00.00

I know we all get these emails from time to time, but they still annoy me. If ‘Peter’ had visited this blog, he would know that every single post since 2006 has been my own, unpaid, unsponsored thoughts. Why would I change that now? You may say it’s a fair question, and […]

No surprises as Facebook slips to third in Alexa, but tech press misses it

17.04.2016/00.44

Above: Facebook’s latest move: ensuring that notifications for messages go to its own app. If you choose not to install it, tough. (Actually, you can reach your messages if you had bookmarked your old message index, and through some digging you can still get there. However, your old habit of clicking on the number won’t […]

Google and Facebook should not head “top brands” lists when consumers do not trust them

10.02.2016/10.38

I’ve always been surprised when I see Google or Facebook appear on any “top brands” lists. It’s branding 101 that a strong brand must have loyalty, awareness, positive associations, perceived quality, as well as proprietary assets, based on the model from David Aaker, and implicit in this, I always thought, was trust. You can neither […]

Putting a full site feed on a Facebook fan page is not a good idea

29.11.2010/11.54

Even though more young women are spending time on Facebook at the exclusion of other sites, last night I decided to stop connecting the Lucire RSS feed in to its Facebook fan page. We began the fan page very late, having relied on using a Facebook group. And even then, these were promoted half-heartedly. […]