wake up and smell the copy
Posted in digression, internet on Dec 8th, 2011
Everyone I’ve spoken to hates Facebook’s ‘frictionless sharing’ thing. You know, the thing that shows you every single article your friends are reading on supported sites. On the occasions when the story sounds interesting, you click the link and get asked to install a social reader, rather than just taken to the story. Install the [...]
Posted in internet, marketing, technology on Sep 30th, 2011
Advertisers want to know if you’re human or machine, while turning you into the latter
Posted in internet on May 12th, 2011
Verb: The practice of adding as many hashtags to a tweet as possible. Possibly more.
Posted in digression, internet, technology on Jan 19th, 2011
I didn’t used to get worried about privacy on social media sites. I don’t tell them much about me, so they don’t have a lot to reveal/sell/give to third-party developers or whatever. But they’re getting weirder. I’ve never, for example, told Facebook where I live, although it obviously knew when I joined the city’s group. [...]
Posted in internet on Nov 4th, 2010
I’m not into games on Facebook, so I generally don’t care which ones my friends are playing. Happily there used to be an option to hide all the updates from a given application, by clicking the cross in the top right and selecting ‘hide all updates from…’ Lately this has disappeared, which is bad news [...]
Aren’t companies great? Every now and then, when shopping online, no matter how fastidiously you tell them you don’t want to hear from them, they decide that you do. I love getting these emails. They almost invariably contain a codicil explaining that you’re receiving the email because you signed up to receive it. Almost invariably [...]
This is great; an error message from Google (in US English) telling me it couldn’t provide content in my language (UK English). I’ve whinged about regional settings before, but it turns out I’m bilingual. Who knew?
Posted in internet, technology on Mar 25th, 2010
Conventional wisdom has it that digital doesn’t degrade gracefully. That unlike, say, the random fuzz introduced into a conventional analogue TV picture by interference, you get the blocky, stalled or jittery breakdown more familiar to digital viewers. It’s generally true, but not always, as I think the image above – produced when a network fault [...]
Posted in internet, journalism on Mar 23rd, 2010
By now, surely the only person who hasn’t seen this Renault Clio being shunted sideways down the A1 (M) is the truck driver responsible, so just in case he’s reading: While the Mail has since tracked down the unhurt 31-year-old Clio driver, details were thin on the ground on Thursday last week as the surely-it-can’t-be-real [...]
Posted in internet, journalism on Mar 20th, 2010
Interesting blog post yesterday from BBC News editor Steve Herrmann, essentially asking “how should we link?” As Herrmann points out, the BBC has always provided relevant links – something I think is essential to good web journalism – but to date it hasn’t seemed comfortable bringing them into the body copy. That’s where the majority [...]
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