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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 2 minutes ago.
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This feed currently contains the following newsitems (total count 1135):
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Wix’s terms of service are just for show—they’re OK with fraud
- Jack Yan
- Ethical players, steer clear of Wix. Unlike most hosts, their terms and conditions are just for show, and are unenforced. In other words, I can report fraud, but they won’t lift a finger. From me to Wix, December 10: Dear Wix Abuse Team: A customer of yours has posted false content, misrepresenting me and [...] Read More... from Wix’s terms of service are just for show—they’re OK with fraud
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The case for Brand Aotearoa
- Jack Yan
- Originally published in Scoop During our mid-year travels, I was surprised to learn that Aotearoa New Zealand doesn’t have the profile that we think it does. We’re not riding the wave of The Lord of the Rings: few abroad remember the connection two decades later. No one I encountered recalls 100% Pure, and if [...] Read More... from The case for Brand Aotearoa
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Incapable of doing the hard work without trading off someone else’s good name
- Jack Yan
- There are still some disinformation articles out there that Semrush caused, and one that was more recent—after Semrush’s admission that my name was actually never trending—is from a mob called Emerald Sky Group (emeraldskygroup.com). I’ve advised them on email and in a post that what they have written is bogus, and, unlike those who [...] Read More... from Incapable of doing the hard work without trading off someone else’s good name
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Autocade reaches 40 million page views; thank you, humans
- Jack Yan
- Autocade has now hit 40 million page views, with the counter at 12,353,148, to be added to the previous installation’s 27,647,011. We’re 159 over the milestone. There has been plenty of activity as we added some pages to match Autocade Year of Cars 2025, our new print yearbook, sitting on 5,222 models, a healthy 114 [...] Read More... from Autocade reaches 40 million page views; thank you, humans
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Autocade Year of Books 2025: the covers that could have been
- Jack Yan
- Would you have bought Autocade Year of Cars 2025 if it had either one of these covers? This one, with the Geely Galaxy E8, was rejected due to image quality. It was going to be the cover till about a week before publication. Then we zoomed in 400 per cent on the output [...] Read More... from Autocade Year of Books 2025: the covers that could have been
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Autocade Year of Cars 2025 now out
- Jack Yan
- We have put a few links around the place, Stanley Moss very kindly referred to it in his blog, and an article has gone up on Lucire: the new Autocade Yearbook is out for 2025. I decided to call it Autocade Year of Cars as that was more distinctive than just Yearbook (which, for [...] Read More... from Autocade Year of Cars 2025 now out
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The new Jaguar
- Jack Yan
- Originally published on my friend and international branding guru Stanley Moss’s blogs, What Is a Brand? and Endless Road, as he requested this piece. Jaguar Land Rover announced some time back that it didn’t see Land Rover as a brand any more. It would rather we think of Defender and Discovery as brands, [...] Read More... from The new Jaguar
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Autocade reaches 5,200 models
- Jack Yan
- We’ve arrived at 5,200 models on Autocade, after catching up on some more recent Chinese brands. The 5,200th model is a crossover, but at least it’s rather more stylish: the Luxeed R7. We’ve had the earlier S7 there for a while, and now we’ve completed the Luxeed line-up. In fact, we’ve completed the current line-ups [...] Read More... from Autocade reaches 5,200 models
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Classic Car Catalogue closes over copyright threat
- Jack Yan
- One of the reasons Keith Adams sold AROnline, a site that he put decades into, was someone alleging he had infringed copyright over a photograph. So he paid up. But for long-term survival, he turned to the team at Great British Car Journey, who had deeper pockets, as AROnline was in danger of closing down. [...] Read More... from Classic Car Catalogue closes over copyright threat
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New Zealand’s 3G switch-off: you might be fine despite the warning messages
- Jack Yan
- I had been concerned that I was getting messages from One NZ (formerly Vodafone) telling me to change my phone because 3G was being killed off. The Australian 3G switch-off made things more concerning, since there are Aussies with virtually new phones being cut off, and the one thing they have in common is that [...] Read More... from New Zealand’s 3G switch-off: you might be fine despite the warning messages
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Keep your corner of the ’net clean
- Jack Yan
- There is a lot of disinformation when it comes to politics—and now you know why it was important for me to get rid of the disinformation about me. No, it’s not because anything written about me could have affected an election. But it is about a medium that takes effort to stay clean and usable, [...] Read More... from Keep your corner of the ’net clean
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How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web
- Jack Yan
- I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats. Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, [...] Read More... from How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web
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A bronze at Best
- Jack Yan
- I’m proud to say I had a small part to play in Pīwari te Kaitiaki, which took out a bronze in the Social Good category at the Designers’ Institute of New Zealand’s Best Design Awards. My role was helping realize the translated version in te reo Māori, and it was an absolute joy to work [...] Read More... from A bronze at Best
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Google doesn’t have to be terrible—it just chooses to be
- Jack Yan
- Do Google results have to be so terrible? No, because here’s GMX, who licenses Google results, and their top 10 results for site:lucire.com. There are some framesets (which regular Google loves), but more of the pages in the top 10 are top-level and current. One note: turns out some of the framesets were [...] Read More... from Google doesn’t have to be terrible—it just chooses to be
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The new disinformation posts may have stopped, but there’s tidying to do
- Jack Yan
- In the businesses I’m actually involved in, there aren’t that many unsavoury people. Maybe in the early to mid-2000s I came across some hangers-on in the fashion world. But SEO, wow, there’s a great deal of unscrupulousness. I’ve seen their con-merchant emails since the late 1990s—all the more reason that being grouped as one of [...] Read More... from The new disinformation posts may have stopped, but there’s tidying to do
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Lucire turns 27, while Autocade’s origins are even older
- Jack Yan
- Lucire turns 27 tomorrow (at the stroke of midnight NZDT as the day ticks over to Monday). After prompting by my friend Richard MacManus, I wrote a piece to mark the anniversary. Though after the song and dance of our 25th anniversary two years ago, I’ve kept it low-key. Meanwhile, I’ve thinned out some [...] Read More... from Lucire turns 27, while Autocade’s origins are even older
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Semrush’s continued dishonesty, and potentially one fewer outlet to expose them
- Jack Yan
- Is this why Search Engine Land refused to run our release about Semrush? Because now, Semrush is their parent company, and they would have known that the deal was happening when they received the release. We also now know that I was right about what was going on—and the biggest names in the search engine [...] Read More... from Semrush’s continued dishonesty, and potentially one fewer outlet to expose them
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A tribute to Helen Baxter, 1973–2024
- Jack Yan
- [Originally published in Lucire] Not only did we lose Mandi Kingsbury last month, we lost a good friend of this magazine, and a dear personal friend, Helen Baxter, who tragically took her own life aged 51 on September 23. This is a reminder that physical changes to one’s health can manifest as depression, and to [...] Read More... from A tribute to Helen Baxter, 1973–2024
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Where is brand Aotearoa?
- Jack Yan
- One thing holding back exports from Aotearoa New Zealand is the absence of a true, authentic national brand. I said this even back in the days of the 100% Pure campaign, which was much lauded. I cynically asked: can we really claim this when France and Germany outspend us on the environment as a percentage [...] Read More... from Where is brand Aotearoa?
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Google results are old
- Jack Yan
- That Google seems to get older and older. Here are the top 10 for site:lucire.com as of October 10, 2024. The home page isn’t there, and maybe that’s OK. But what is there is the index.html file to the 2000 folder, which was put there to catch any programming errors (e.g. forgetting to [...] Read More... from Google results are old
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Continuing the disinformation removal and bot blocks
- Jack Yan
- Call me an idealist, but I think people should stop using those search engine copy massaging programs, write like real humans, and expect the technology to bend to us, rather than the other way round. That’s how we still conduct business. There are still disinformation pages out there, but no new ones since I called [...] Read More... from Continuing the disinformation removal and bot blocks
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Blocking the Semrush bots
- Jack Yan
- It’s not enough to block just Semrush’s bot, SemrushBot, in one’s robots.txt, since they have a whole bunch of them. We’ve usually allowed all bots but with “AI” and Semrush’s terrible programming that wasted hours of my time every day for nine months, there are certain parties no longer welcome to crawl. To block Semrush [...] Read More... from Blocking the Semrush bots
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Quick test of index size on the occidental search engines
- Jack Yan
- Google really doesn’t like this blog. When I do a site: search, it still puts HTML pages up top, often pre-2010, and as of yesterday, it trails Mojeek and Bing in terms of the number of pages in its index. Who knew? Google being last of the three. It got me wondering how [...] Read More... from Quick test of index size on the occidental search engines
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Here’s probably how Semrush linked concepts—and got it totally wrong
- Jack Yan
- When you have been on this disinformation-busting journey for nine months, you can work out how Semrush got everything so wrong. Here’s one item, a bunch of SEO tools, and if you read the description, ‘Google SEO Xiaoyan’ is in the copy. Probably deeply questionable, which is why Google offers it for Chrome. [...] Read More... from Here’s probably how Semrush linked concepts—and got it totally wrong
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If it’s important, you can depend on Google to act as censor
- Jack Yan
- We know Meta’s not on the side of justice or democracy, as it shows over and over again, and OnlyKlans’ fascist leanings are obvious. Google pretends that it’s all about the algorithms when we know it’s not: for years it would censor anything critical of itself when I posted to my old Google Plus account. [...] Read More... from If it’s important, you can depend on Google to act as censor
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Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech
- Jack Yan
- How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google. The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their [...] Read More... from Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech
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Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?
- Jack Yan
- Now isn’t that interesting? After posting about Semrush on their Reddit, where their error is laid bare for all to see, I have now had a blissful 48 hours where there were no new disinformation posts about yours truly pop up on Google searches. So much for Semrush claiming that it could not remove a [...] Read More... from Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?
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Autocade reaches 39 million page views
- Jack Yan
- Here we are, 39 million page views on Autocade, as the stats’ counter ticked over to 11,361,125 earlier today (which we add to the previous installation’s 27,647,011). It’s two months, 16 days since we were at 38 million, and as July and August were leap months, that’s 78 days. Last time it was 50 days. [...] Read More... from Autocade reaches 39 million page views
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“AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade
- Jack Yan
- 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
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If you’re still writing disinformation after all this, then tech is your master, and you are the slave
- Jack Yan
- If you peel away the technobabble of what Semrush said to me on Reddit, basically their algorithm messed up when it included an unspaced version of my name. It wasn’t trending. It was just an extrapolation made by an algorithm that, unfortunately, had a very negative consequence for me. But it also didn’t help [...] Read More... from If you’re still writing disinformation after all this, then tech is your master, and you are the slave
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