What really killed the old, cool web

Richard MacManus’s Cybercultural I’ve mentioned as a must-read if you want to explore the history of the web. And today, Stephen Judd showed a collection of links, among which was this 2017 entry by Amy Hoy, ‘How the blog broke the web’. Hoy traces the origins of the blog back to a web diary (web […]

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Why should any server resources be given to SEO?

Vindication of yesterday’s decision to block Alibaba’s bots on Autocade: it’s attempting to access load.php with a huge string, not one that would normally be available to a casual web user   As Autocade’s visitor numbers surge to over a million a month today, we are continuing to make sure the bots are blocked (and, […]

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Weekend thoughts: farewell, Ian Crawford; online disinformation; Alibaba and Amazon scrapers

It was sad to read of the passing of Ian Crawford, the former TV producer, whom I got to know through Lucire in his post-Crawfords career. I never pressed Ian about Crawford Productions and preferred to keep things on topic about his Pacific resort. It was out of respect as I had the sense (rightly […]

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The “AI”-free joints are the places to hang out (where everybody knows your name)

Nice to get some link love from Mashable, though unfortunately Wordpress didn’t pick it up. I only knew because 13 spun splogs, including “AI”-translated ones, picked it up and linked us, and my blog had a queue of track-back requests. Chris Taylor’s ‘Welcome to Google AI Mode! Everything is fine’, with the sub-lede ‘Wait a […]

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When dead trees beat the internet

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, […]

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Google searches aren’t straightforward any more

I haven’t used Google as a default search engine for 15 years, so odds are I haven’t witnessed its enshittification as gradually as most people. To me it is a surprise when I see new bugs and errors.     Have these errors simply increased so imperceptibly over time that people just accept them? This […]

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How the search engines fared with a new site

As Autocade World is a relatively new site, it has been interesting to see how some of the search engines have fared. It is a Wordpress site, which experience tells me presents a set of issues when it comes to search. Mojeek: barely anything. Four links to date, though an interesting mix of the home […]

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

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 […]

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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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Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it

Again, things I’ve been pointing out for over a decade—heck, even over two decades, if you consider early concerns I had over Yahoo!—are now mainstream thought. Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter begins: A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world—watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every […]

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