Ostensibly our culture values and rewards independence, ingenuity and go-getting entrepreneurialism, and yet it’s not uncommon to hear poster-boys for these vaunted values crying foul when things go wrong, even when they turn out to have been negligent in failing to mitigate what should have been obvious risks. This phenomena should sound familiar for anyone who’s…
The blurb for Tom Chatfield’s How to Thrive in the Digital Age suggests a book with something substantial to say. The author, we’re told, has examined what our ‘wired’ life is really doing to our minds, for better and for worse, and based on “innovative and practical research”, will teach us how to prosper in…
A couple of weeks ago, a colleague unearthed some interesting discussion about the “unlisted” geographic target setting in Google Webmaster Tools. I use the word “interesting” in a very specific sense here, of course; I don’t recommend relying on this as an icebreaker at parties. Anyway, it seems there’s a difference between not setting a…
The current tizzy in France over whether Google News is ripping off French newspapers is amazing. If you missed it, the gist is that French media think Google should pay them for linking to their content via Google News. Not only that, they want a law to enforce it. I’m sure there must be more…
One of my aims with this site is to test out and better understand technologies and techniques, new and old, that help to make websites work better. Currently, one of the most exciting areas of newfangledness is semantic search, Google’s Knowledge Graph and microdata. For the uninitiated, microdata is a way to add machine readable…
Spam! Of course you hate it, but what are you doing about it? Until quite recently I thought that, other than setting up some pretty aggressive inbox filters, there isn’t much one can do about it, except perhaps to become a baiter in order to have a bit of a laugh at the spammers’ expense…