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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 9 minutes ago.
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This feed currently contains the following newsitems (total count 892):
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If you take out Tiktok, then why not Meta, too?
- Jack Yan
- The Hon Debbie Ngarewa-Packer MP was right when she questioned our government’s decision to ban Tiktok from parliamentary devices. If it’s about foreigners getting hold of data, then why not ban Facebook and Instagram? Last I looked, Tiktok had not, unlike Facebook, been party to any genocides. Parliamentary Services says at least Meta is American […]
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The golden age of Pontiac illustrations
- Jack Yan
- The gargantuan full-size 1971–6 Pontiacs went up on Autocade (Laurentian, Catalina, Parisienne, Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari) last week, and they reminded me of the golden era of Pontiac illustrations. That era didn’t stretch into the 1970s that much: you saw them for the 1967s through to the 1971s, before photography took over more. […]
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Bing is coming back to life
- Jack Yan
- In quite an unexpected about-turn, Bing began spidering Lucire’s website again, and not just the old stuff. A site:lucire.com search actually has pages from after 2009 now, and while 42 per cent of results still get repeated from page to page, there are actually pages from the 2010s and the 2020s. There are still a […]
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The IBM Selectric version of Univers revived
- Jack Yan
- This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt. A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even […]
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There is no point to posting on Twitter
- Jack Yan
- The demise of Twitter continues. Today I saw, while heading back to Tawa from Papakōwhai, the aftermath of a seven-vehicle accident (three cars, four commercial vehicles) on the opposite side of State Highway 1. I posted this on Mastodon, and, made an exception and did a fresh message on OnlyKlans, I mean, Twitter. You know, […]
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Nostalgia is not a business strategy
- Jack Yan
- Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good ol’ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. It’s why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Musk’s nostalgia. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what’s going on at OnlyKlans, […]
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Another example of Google’s antiquity when it comes to search results
- Jack Yan
- Is Google now the Wayback Machine, too? Since I haven’t used Google regularly since 2010, I can’t do what’s called a longitudinal study, though when I started examining search engine results for Lucire after Bing tanked last year, nothing in my Google searches jumped out at me—till earlier in 2023. I guess wherever Bing goes, […]
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Pirates must love GoDaddy
- Jack Yan
- If you are a pirate, then GoDaddy seems to be the place to host. Last November, we spotted three stolen articles on the sephari.co.nz domain, which appears to be hosted by GoDaddy. I filed two DMCA notices, to no avail. They were in the standard format, one that GoDaddy requests and has acted on in […]
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Autocade is about to turn 15
- Jack Yan
- Above: The 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia. Next week, Autocade will turn 15. I don’t expect big editorials extolling its history, mainly because the site has not changed much in principle or appearance since it was first conceived in 2008. We did a single video under the Autocade name, which my friend Stuart Cowley filmed, […]
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Nostalgic thoughts: what sparked my interest in fashion magazines, and Nike’s 10 rules for business
- Jack Yan
- I have told this story many times: I became interested in fashion magazines with a 1989 issue of Studio Collections. In fact, it was its fifth anniversary issue. I really liked the typesetting, photography and print quality. I was probably one of the few people disappointed when they went to desktop publishing and the […]
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Of course Bing AI makes stuff up—Bing itself does
- Jack Yan
- Of course some of us expected Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT to be rubbish—and we knew ChatGPT would make stuff up. Because Bing makes stuff up. If you have a normal, functioning web crawler (or spider), there’s no way you would ever wind up with pages that have never existed. Nothing about this is […]
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Free 2023 wall planner
- Jack Yan
- I needed a 2023 wall planner today, but none of the downloadable ones really suited—so I made my own. Rather than keep it to myself, I thought I’d offer it as a free download, in case anyone else wants it. They’re two A4s, six months on each, but as the file’s a PDF, you […]
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Cory Doctorow might be predicting the end of the web as we know it
- Jack Yan
- Two great pieces by Cory Doctorow came my way today on Mastodon. The first is an incredibly well argued piece about why people leave social networks. Facebook and Twitter won’t be immune, just as MySpace and Bebo weren’t. One highlight: As people and businesses started to switch away from the social media giants, inverse network […]
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Being transparent: you might as well know what you’re going to click on
- Jack Yan
- This may be wise, or it may not be. I thought netizens would want to know if a page was ancient, and since Google keeps putting really old stuff that hasn’t been linked for nearly 20 years into the top 10 for a site:lucire.com search, I may as well let readers know what they’re going […]
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Your preferences mean nothing to Google or Microsoft
- Jack Yan
- I could just repeat my post from January 26. Let’s face it, Google is a notorious spammer, with a failing search engine, and an advertising business that’s a decent negligence lawsuit away from collapsing. It was 2011 when I showed everyone that your opt-out settings in Google Ads Preferences Manager were meaningless. Today, your email […]
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Google’s top 10 continues to bring up old pages; and it looks like Bing’s about to kick us off
- Jack Yan
- After years of using the web, I think I know a little about how web spidering works. The web spider hits your home page (provided it knows about it), then proceeds to follow the links on it. Precedence is given to the pages within your site that are linked most, or are top-level: in Lucire’s […]
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Why we’ve dropped Disqus, and the shenanigans of the online ad world
- Jack Yan
- When I first signed up to Disqus, there was the option to have no ads. But with Lucire we allowed them, because I figured, why not? Disqus’s rules were pretty clear: you’d earn money on the ads shown, and once you got to US$100, they’d pay out. The trouble is those ads made so little […]
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Is Microsoft trying to stem its losses from Bing?
- Jack Yan
- If Appledystopia is right in its 2020 article, Microsoft loses US$1·5 milliard per annum on Bing. So maybe that explains why it’s worsened so much. Microsoft might well be finding ways to cut its losses, and servers cost money. Pity that none of the Bing clones are saying anything, not even Duck Duck Go’s usually […]
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Nice try, Marissa Mayer, but no conversion
- Jack Yan
- I had a chuckle at Marissa Mayer saying that Google results are worse because the web is worse. As I’ve shown with a site:lucire.com search, which is a good one since our site pre-dates Google (just), Google is less capable of providing the relevant pages for a typical search. I know how web spiders work […]
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Confused Google doesn’t understand email preferences
- Jack Yan
- As if to prove my point about lies, Google spammed me right after my last post. In its footer: No, I didn’t. I logged into Google to see my settings. Sure enough: As I always say, when it comes to computers, I’m right, they’re wrong. I have a better memory. I […]
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Now Google is worsening on a site: search: framesets from the early 2000s are in the top 10
- Jack Yan
- This was never supposed to become a search engine blog, but like the Facebook “malware scanner” (or was that scammer?) and Google lying about its Ads Preferences Manager, I was forced to investigate when no one in the media (or, for that matter, the wider internet) did. And over the years, those posts really helped […]
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‘Google … broke the web’
- Jack Yan
- Nice to see I’m not the only one who sees Google for what it is today. Warning: coarse language. What’s bizarre is a reply I wrote largely in agreement (and had a few likes to) has vanished. Maybe some Google lovers didn’t like what I wrote? Sometimes I can make the point better […]
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For most sites, Bing continues to shrink
- Jack Yan
- The New York Times’ presence on Bing has plunged back to the thousands—it was 2,723 on August 2 Back in July, I ran site: searches on a small range of websites to see just how bad things had got with Bing. In January, I can report some have gone worse. And back in July […]
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The emperor has no clothes, so Microsoft does what little it can do
- Jack Yan
- When you’ve been saying the emperor has no clothes for the last few months—and on the emperor’s forums—I shouldn’t be surprised we are at this point now. Bing is virtually dead, and they don’t want me probing Bing Webmaster Tools (which are largely useless) about my own sites to show up even more of their […]
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Marking galleries private today
- Jack Yan
- Along came Copytrack again yesterday, identifying an image that they allege we stole and put on Lucire’s website. And once again I had to go back through old emails—only 11 years this time, not 13 like the last—to retrieve the email to prove that I had the correct licence to publish it, and that and […]
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How the search engines fare on a site: search here
- Jack Yan
- Time to do some analysis on the age of the search results for this site through the search engines. I’m curious about the drop in hits. ‘Contents’ pages’ also include static pages and, in Bing’s case, PDFs. Mojeek Contents’ pages: ★★★★★★★★★ 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 ★★ 2007 ★ 2008 ★★ 2009 ★★★★★★ 2010 […]
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From January 3, blog traffic went well down
- Jack Yan
- Around January 3, the regular traffic to each blog post fell off a cliff here. Either my posts have suddenly become a bore and not worth reading, or something else external has happened. Is Feedburner dead? Is it because my Twitter account is locked (by me, a few weeks ago)? Is it the death of […]
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A format so old, it’s new and radical
- Jack Yan
- Above: I spy Natasha Lyonne and a Plymouth Barracuda. So the car is part of her screen identity? So it should be, it’s television. I might have to watch this. Two very fascinating responses come up in Wired’s interview with director Rian Johnson on the Netflix release of his film Glass Onion. I’m not […]
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Life’s could-have-beens
- Jack Yan
- A Mastodon post about my mayoral campaign policies. No, I didn’t foresee a global pandemic as such (though I certainly was on Twitter perplexed at why the WHO had not declared COVID-19 a global emergency in January 2020), but I did feel there was insufficient resilience in our economy and wanted to advance ideas […]
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Elizabeth Arden is missing out on a big market here
- Jack Yan
- As this wasn’t shared much on social media, I can only assume not many of you share my sense of humour. It’s a fake, of course, since I’m feverish from the first dose of the shingles vaccine (if you look down the side-effects list, I have them all) I needed something to ease my way […]
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