Stuff I think about or notice on the internet
Facebook claims that it “maintains a robust reporting infrastructure that leverages our hundreds of millions of users to look for offensive or potentially dangerous content.”
But I’ve discovered that this is rubbish. Its methods for reporting inappropriate content are confusing, flawed or missing.
Read the full post ...I can think of a way to save the Royal Mail some money – abolish their mad scheme for controlling who links to them – which involves being posted a paper licence to do so.
This is the saga of my trying to link to the Royal Mail site.
eHow says Acai Berries are wonderful – eat them. Although it also says they have no benefits.
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People are often complaining that they want to log into two Gmail accounts at once (the answer is to use two browsers, or Chrome in incognito mode). I seem to now be logged into two accounts at once – even though I don’t want to be – potentially exposing someone else’s details.
Read the full post ...I’ve summarised the bits about the website plans from the BBC’s strategic review, to save you having to read the whole long, rambling document.
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Obviously, Google Chrome extensions are cool (like plugins for Firefox), as they enable you to get your browser to do new things. But having installed the bit.ly one, it turned out to be a bit of a pain.
Instructions on the internet for how to remove / delete extensions for google’s Chrome (I’m running version 5.0.307.11 beta) are sadly lacking – or way overcomplicated. It turned out to be quite easy.
Read the full post ...I’ve blogged about Jan Moir and the PCC over at libdemvoice.org. Why not read it and leave a comment? Here’s a taste:
Second, the PCC is excusing what she wrote on the grounds that someone else had said it already. On this basis, newspapers can justify any factual inaccuracy as long as someone else said it first. What was Cowley supposed to do, track down the first journalist to wrongly claim Gately died alone and complain about them only?
Read the full post ...reedom of speech and the future of the internet are at stake. An Italian court has found some Google executives guilty after some students filmed themselves bullying a boy with Down’s syndrome [1] and then uploaded the clip to Google Video. The students were later convicted for their actions.
According to Tom Watson MP, the decision to hold Google liable for publishing the video:
“is the biggest threat to internet freedom we have seen in Europe. The only people who will support this decision are Silvio Berlusconi and the governments of China and Iran. It effectively breaks the internet in Italy.”
Well, Tom, you can make that Berlusconi, the Chinese and Iranian governments – and me.
Read the full post ...An astonishing video from a hong kong news station where they use 3d avatars to show gordon brown attacking people and losing his temper …
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Ever done a search for Ann Widdecombe? No, me neither until today. There’s an interesting image shown, as you can see.
Read the full post ...The Guardian reports that the PCC has rejected all the complaints (more than 25,000) about Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately.
As it’s late, I shall limit myself to comparing the reported ruling with the original article …
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I might be going bonkers. But I have a Firefox stylesheet that reveals which links are nofollow. And ‘m fairly sure that, last time I looked, @ mentions of people’s names weren’t nofollowed – but now are, as this screenshot demonstrates.
Read the full post ...You may have seen the news that ReadWriteWeb posted a story about facebook’s login. It appeared at the top of google for a search on “facebook login”, leading to, allegedly, 000s of people turning up and trying to log in to facebook.
Here are the best of the 1,500-odd comments, to save you the trouble of ploughing through them. After the first page or so, most of the “I want to log in” comments appear to be jokes – leading to the suspicion that after the first few genuinely confused people, this massive thread is, in fact, between people pretending to be idiots, and people claiming they can’t believe people are such idiots.
Read the full post ...The Information Commissioner’s Office says recording phone calls is nothing to do with it.
Read the full post ...Whatever you do, don’t follow the wordpress advice on SEO …
It seems to think keywords are really important but meta descriptions aren’t.
Exacting revenge on a company that secretly added links to clients’ sites by targeting their analytics data …
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Visit petitions.number10.gov.uk and you can create an electronic petition, calling on the government to take some action. Then you get a response, “usually provided there are 500 signatures or more”.
So how many people sign these petitions?
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Twitter seems to be adding an explanation to some trends, sourced from whatthetrend.com. Here’s an example for a search on John Terry today.
Seems a good innovation to me. Should help with some of the more mysterious trends that only carry on as people ask why is X trending.
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John Terry’s been “nobbing” Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend as one of the edits on Wikipedia puts it. Terry got a superinjunction forbidding publication of this story – and of the fact that there was an injunction. This all fell apart on Friday. The case raises some interesting issues:
Despite the superinjunction, you could find out about the [...]
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This is the personal blog of Malcolm Coles.