Blogger and recovering journalist Elizabeth Tai writes about the state of Google Search and how that affects the wider internet in Is the Internet really broken?
She also looks at how the Verge covered its take on this.
It’s a nuanced take. She, rightly, points out there are ways the internet in general and search are broken from both the user and the online writer or publisher’s point of view. Heaven knows it’s hard to get noticed by Google these days if you aren’t selling something and SEOed up to your eyeballs.
For the most part she agrees with the Verge, but doesn’t like the emotive language.
However, I’m less confident than Tai, that Mastodon, Substack and others are “rising to fill the gap”. It’s a nice sentiment, but it feels more and more like a defensive, alternative world for a niche audience.
The one thing we both agree on is that there is no big money in this, except perhaps for Substack which is funded by venture capital and will be under pressure to give investors a huge pay day.
Over the last decade I’ve written more than 300 features for the NZ Herald’s business reports. Perhaps the most noticeable change in that time is how the idea of business sustainability has gone from being a theory to being mainstream. There are few large New Zealand companies that don’t have a strong sustainability story.
Sure, you’ll find greenwashing, and it’s not always perfect. There is still a long way to go, but the progress is real.
In this year’s Sustainable Business report I interviewed Toitū chief science and advisory officer Belinda Mathers who works to certify companies as they reduce or even eliminate emissions.
There’s a story about RDT working with Auckland Airport to build a retail centre that takes sustainability a long way beyond emissions reductions.
Waste Management is moving fast to electrify one of New Zealand’s largest commercial vehicle fleets.
Law firm MinterEllisonRuddWatts wants New Zealand to get a move on building more clean electricity generation capacity.
And I interviewed Abbie Reynolds from the Nature Conservancy about looking for a fresh approach to conservation and protecting the natural environment.
Today’s newsletter includes a short editorial suggesting that a new Provincial Growth Fund would fix many gaps in New Zealand’s rural broadband and mobile coverage.
Gabor Cselle writes about the lessons from Twitter alternative T2-Pebble not making it.
For me there were two flaws. He mentions both.
First, not getting an app out to the market. The web interface was fine in itself, but not the best way to consume a feed.
Second, not joining the Fediverse and providing access to a wider range of accounts and ideas.
In practice I found the small community was friendly enough, but there was close to zero focus on anything I care about.
While most of us are aware of Betteridge’s law of headlines, I think there is a subset of cases where the right answer to the news headline written as a question is DUH!
Apologies to any social media folk who think I may have paid too little attention to your online, quick-witted brilliance today. I’m trying to get some work done in a hurry and rudely turned off all distractions.
Normal admiration will resume shortly.
Jumped out of my skin at 8am when my loud ring tone blasted sound through the house. It was an incoming call from Australia. The caller rang three times. It would have been 6am in eastern Australia so I assumed the call must be urgent. Turned out to be a pocket dial from someone I’ve never met. They were spectacularly grumpy about being woken up when I returned the call.
A jolly good show:
In the populated parts of New Zealand you are never too far away from someone selling decent quality pies.
Wondered why I wasn’t getting responses to micro.blog posts from my phone. Turns out it I was sending them all to the test blog.
One of the most New Zealand things I can think of is how people say hello to a driver when they get on a bus and then thank the driver when they get off.
Was up early today. First to watch Chelsea get beaten in the English Premier League, then to watch the All Blacks narrowly miss winning the Rugby World Cup.
When my team loses, Mrs B says “well, it wouldn’t be fun if they won all the time”.
It’s not that helpful.
Last week I wrote this about the state of Twitter a year after it changed hands:
I also talked about the post on RNZ’s Nine-to-Noon radio show:
I love how the best pie or best sausage roll awards are considered front page stories in New Zealand newspapers.
I subscribe to the New Zealand Herald (I also freelance for the Herald) Of course I’m OK with that. Journalists deserve to be paid for their work. But I do find it annoying when certain stories appear on the Herald site require yet another paywall subscription. My pockets aren’t that deep.
Humans in Australia and New Zealand can hear I have a British accent. After almost 40 years living here, it is not as British as it was. Weirdly, voice recognition works best for me when I use Australian settings. It is as if the computer thinks I’m Australian.
What’s that about?
This is bad journalism practice. Not good for media transparency.
The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper.
Bill Bennett joins Kathryn to talk about how Twitter has changed in the year since Elon Musk’s $44b buyout. He’ll also look at why video streamers are pushing up prices well beyond inflation and why it might come with ads. And North Korean agents have been insinuating their way into tens of thousands of freelance IT roles around the world - what’s the danger and what are some of the signs one has been hired?
I’m sad, but not surprised to see Pebble has pulled the plug on its Twitter alternative.
The site never got past basic functionality, there was never a Pebble app.
Pebble was intended to be, and, up to a point, delivered on being, a non-toxic, calmer, version of Twitter.
There were some good ideas embedded in the site.
But it wasn’t that interesting or engaging. Pebble wasn’t the place for breaking news. It didn’t achieve a critical mass in the communities or subject areas that interest me.
I found my visits were fewer and further between.
Worst of all, Pebble was too cut off from the rest of the web. If there is a viable path on from Twitter, the idea of ActivityPub has to be in there somewhere.
And that is the lesson of Pebble’s demise: any new social media alternative needs to fit into the wider online context.
Here we go again with another cyclone potentially heading towards northern New Zealand. Thankfully this one should diminish before it gets here, apparently we may see a few over the next six months or so.
Where is Roadrunner?
Modern etiquette question.
How rude is it if I never answer those damn customer service surveys?
I used to answer them honestly, but that turns out to be a huge problem.
Trying to figure out if all the Federation development that’s been going on recently means I can now follow an indieweb enabled site like boffosocko.com from micro.blog.
The website hasn’t been updated in over a decade, yet there is still value in Unnecessary journalism phrases.
It is just what it says on the label. The website shows the wordy phrases journalists use to pad their copy.
Each phrase is simply illustrated with a handful of recent examples, mainly taken from US newspapers.
Some examples:
Never Before Lifeless body 4 p.m. in the afternoon
Before we get carried away, many journalists, including myself are paid by the word. A few unnecessary phrases will buy a cup of coffee. Write enough and you can pay off the mortgage.
I’m not one for new year resolutions, but IF I had one it would be to not write trolling, dumb-arsed questions in headlines.
That said, stories with questioning headlines tend to get read more often and propagated more widely around the internet. Which is a minor moral dilemma.
Some questions are legitimate. I’d argue that
are fair enough. You’ll notice they can not be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.