Here are some web trends for 2020:
Responsive web design in 2020 should be a given because every serious project that you create should look good and be completely usable on all devices. But there’s no need to over-complicate things.
Web Development in 2020: What Coding Tools You Should Learn article gives an overview of recommendations what you learn to become a web developer in 2020.
You might have seen Web 3.0 on some slides. What is the definition of web 3 we are talking about here?
There seems to be many different to choose from… Some claim that you need to blockchain the cloud IOT otherwise you’ll just get a stack overflow in the mainframe but I don’t agree on that.
Information on the web address bar will be reduced on some web browsers. With the release of Chrome 79, Google completes its goal of erasing www from the browser by no longer allowing Chrome users to automatically show the www trivial subdomain in the address bar.
You still should target to build quality web site and avoid the signs of a low-quality web site. Get good inspiration for your web site design.
Still a clear and logical structure is the first thing that needs to be turned over in mind before the work on the website gears up. The website structure for search robots is its internal links. The more links go to a page, the higher its priority within the website, and the more times the search engine crawls it.
You should upgrade your web site, but you need to do it sensibly and well. Remember that a site upgrade can ruin your search engine visibility if you do it badly. The biggest risk to your site getting free search engine visibility is site redesign. Bad technology selection can ruin the visibility of a new site months before launch. Many new sites built on JavaScript application frameworks do not benefit in any way from the new technologies. Before you go into this bandwagon, you should think critically about whether your site will benefit from the dynamic capabilities of these technologies more than they can damage your search engine visibility. Well built redirects can help you keep the most outbound links after site changes.
If you go to the JavaScript framework route on your web site, keep in mind that there are many to choose, and you need to choose carefully to find one that fits for your needs and is actively developed also in the future.
JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you’re not alone… a chunk of pros also feel JS is ‘overly complex’
Keep in mind the recent changes on the video players and Google analytics. And for animated content keep in mind that GIF animations exists still as a potential tool to use.
Keep in mind the the security. There is a skill gap in security for many. I’m not going to say anything that anyone who runs a public-facing web server doesn’t already know: the majority of these automated blind requests are for WordPress directories and files. PHP exploits are a distant second. And there are many other things that are automatically attacked. Test your site with security scanners.
APIs now account for 40% of the attack surface for all web-enabled apps. OWASP has identified 10 areas where enterprises can lower that risk. There are many vulnerability scanning tools available. Check also How to prepare and use Docker for web pentest . Mozilla has a nice on-line tool for web site security scanning.
The slow death of Flash continues. If you still use Flash, say goodbye to it. Google says goodbye to Flash, will stop indexing Flash content in search.
Use HTTPS on your site because without it your site rating will drop on search engines visibility. It is nowadays easy to get HTTPS certificates.
Write good content and avoid publishing fake news on your site. Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy,
Think to who you are aiming to your business web site to. Analyze who is your “true visitor” or “power user”. A true visitor is a visitor to a website who shows a genuine interest in the content of the site. True visitors are the people who should get more of your site and have the potential to increase the sales and impact of your business. The content that your business offers is intended to attract visitors who are interested in it. When they show their interest, they are also very likely to be the target group of the company.
Should you think of your content management system (CMS) choice? Flexibility, efficiency, better content creation: these are just some of the promised benefits of a new CMS. Here is How to convince your developers to change CMS.
Here are some fun for the end:
Did you know that if a spider creates a web at a place?
The place is called a website
Confession: How JavaScript was made.
2,339 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
The most important boring idea in the universe
https://bigthink.com/13-8/science-standards-evidence/#Echobox=1643785417
We live in a world dominated by science, but most people don’t understand its most essential characteristic: establishing standards of evidence to keep us from getting fooled by our own biases and opinions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://royalsociety.org/news/2022/01/scientific-misinformation-report/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
https://royalsociety.org/news/2022/01/scientific-misinformation-report/
Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online, a report by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has said.
The Online Information Environment report also warns that the UK Government’s upcoming Online Safety Bill focuses on harms to individuals while failing to recognise the wider ‘societal harms’ that misinformation can cause. Misinformation about scientific issues, from vaccine safety to climate change, can cause harm to individuals and society at large.
The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms and warns such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.
It recommends wide-ranging measures that governments, tech platforms and academic institutions can take to build resilience to misinformation and a healthy online information environment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://viral-loops.com/blog/how-to-make-your-product-go-viral/
Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s Ahead For 2022? A Brand Strategist’s Predictions
https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftrib.al%2FiwBg4lz&h=AT3MivdFr5_ZrAhBmalwSNe7qDOBdeTfGAk3SLusPV3AOEyab2hTzCZBSqt9ELgAo38gwBREmq-p51BiWSWFEeEzSznkxoSWdHY7V-V9KD3DiIwKtS9p9Ehd0z6esQrJcA
Recently, Jen Kem, a brand futurist and strategist, shared some of her predictions for the coming year. Many are especially helpful to one-person businesses. Here are a handful I found most helpful.
1. “Microbrands” will sizzle. Businesses that focus their content creation on a single social platform—whether it’s YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok—will be well-positioned, according to Kem. If you’re looking to get the most out of your efforts, niching down to one platform that you can truly master is more important than posting to four platforms every day.
2. Publishing your “framework” will give you authority. Writing a book, whether it’s traditionally published or self-published, can create instant credibility for your business methods and brand in the eyes of potential customers. “The point of your book isn’t to generate revenue,” she says. “Will it make you some money? Absolutely. However, the real leverage from a book is to create more authority and credibility around your brand.”
3. Hybrid business models for experts will take off. Some clients gravitate to the DIY approach. Others like an expert to help them with whatever it is they are trying to do. Offering a combination of self-paced learning, such as a curriculum you’ve created, and personalized feedback on a weekly or monthly basis will allow them to choose what’s right for them in their journey, says Kem. “Offers that implement this hybrid approach will encourage clients to find greater success, which creates more results, which, in turn, attracts more people who want to be a client.”
4. “Brandcraft” will be essential. Businesses that focus on their brand’s craft—and let customers see the process of creating the work—will be in the hottest demand, according to Kem. If you run a bakery, for instance, creating a video showing how you make one of your signature cakes can go a long way.
5. Consumers will flock to “mirror” brands. Consumers want more than just to be part of an online community of people who buy from a brand. What they’re really seeking are “mirror” brands “with a community of people that whole heartedly engage with the brand and each other,” says Kem. She considers Harley-Davidson, Twitch, and Etsy to be good examples of brand with a glue that binds customers together.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Catherine Yeo / Creative Contemplation:
The struggle to get Wikipedia bios approved for creators like TikTok star Bella Poarch shows how mainstream media coverage, or lack of it, affects Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s Struggle with Creators
Notability, Necessity, Non-objectivity
https://cyeo.substack.com/p/wikipedia-struggle-creators
In today’s piece, I share an essay reflecting on my experience writing for Wikipedia and how the site struggles to understand the notability of digital creators.
Years ago, I started editing on Wikipedia because I was annoyed by the inconsistent quality across different articles. For example:
A toast sandwich, a sandwich where the filling is another slice of toast, has its own article (complete with 7 subsections and 14 citations)…
… while esteemed UCLA professor and Asian American literary critic King-Kok Cheung has three sentences written on her biography.
With just one click on the ‘Edit’ button, it is quite easy to modify most Wikipedia articles and submit your proposed changes. Anyone else on the Internet can swoop in to add to your edits, replace your edits, or revert them entirely.
To create a new article, the process takes longer. You will need to research, draft, and submit the article for veteran Wikipedia editors to review. This review process can take anywhere from hours to months, and could end in a variety of ways: approval, deletion, being redirected, being merged into another article, or being put on hold as a draft.
Out of the 1.7 million biographies on this massive encyclopedia, only 20% feature women. S
what does the Wikipedia landscape look like for creators?
There’s no denying that content creators have stormed into our lives as celebrities. Big-name creators like MrBeast, Lilly Singh, and the D’Amelio sisters have all woven their way into mainstream media and become household names. They rightfully deserve to be on Wikipedia, and many are.
But notability, as its own notion, is inherently subjective.
Wikipedia tries to go around that by setting detailed guidelines for satisfying notability. In particular, the more reputable, secondary media coverage the biographical subject has, the more likely the biography will get approved. Wikipedia has even constructed subject-specific criteria for a range of categories, such as academics, athletes, and films.
… So where do creators fit in?
Unlike other professions, creators establish their own notability. Each creator walks a different path, whether that’s going viral off of one video (e.g. Bella Poarch, who blew up from one TikTok that is now the most liked video on the app ever) or consistently growing their content (e.g. Marques Brownlee, who has been posting videos on YouTube for 13+ years, since the age of 15).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day:
Meta, which ignored creators for years, has only “shameless” publishers and their content to fall back on in its pivots to video and eventual irrelevance — Read to the end for a tremendous meditation on February — Facebook Made Its Own World And Now It’s Stuck In It
The end of the metaverse hopefully
Read to the end for a tremendous meditation on February
https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-end-of-the-metaverse-hopefully
Facebook Made Its Own World And Now It’s Stuck In It
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, had a pretty bad day yesterday. The company, on an earnings call, reported that it had lost users for the first time in its history. The market then responded. The company’s valuation dropped $232 billion, the biggest 24-hour drop in the stock market’s history.
Many outlets are pointing to Facebook’s completely idiotic pivot to “the metaverse” as the main reason for its current predicament. Nikita Bier, the founder of the tbh app, which was acquired by Facebook in 2017, had a good take on this, tweeting, “Facebook’s hands are tied. 1—High ARPU coastal users have churned; TikTok is eating their lunch. 2—They can’t acquire because of antitrust scrutiny. 3—They can’t build because founders don’t want to be there. 4—IDFA killed their ability to target ads. 5—The metaverse is 10yrs out. RIP.”
And he’s right! Cool young people aren’t on Facebook or Instagram anymore. After growing up in the shadow of the Facebook-designed viral pop culture of the 2010s, young adults are now much more interested in posting inscrutable Tumblr memes on TikTok. And Meta, as a company, can’t keep up because it actually has not designed anything of value since it launched the News Feed in 2006. Every “innovation” made by Zuckerberg and his team has actually been an acquisition. And now, as Bier points out, they can’t buy up any new good ideas. The Identifier for Advertisers feature has been effectively killed by Apple, meaning Facebook’s ad tracking has become much worse. And, finally, most crucially, no one wants virtual reality. If virtual reality is going to catch on, it’s not going to be Facebook’s sanitized Habbo Hotel Zoom call world. Obviously, the only thing that’s going to make virtual reality catch on is some kind of sex machine that is so addictive people starve to death strapped into their jerking chair or whatever.
Every few weeks, someone on Twitter notices how demented the content on Facebook is. I’ve covered a lot of these stories. The quick TL;DR is that Facebook’s video section is essentially run by a network of magicians and Vegas stage performers who hack the platform’s algorithm with surreal low-value content designed to distract users long enough to trigger an in-video advertisement and anger them enough to leave a comment.
Unlike YouTube, which, for all its mistakes over the years, actually seems to be regularly in public conversation with its creators, Facebook, from what I can tell, has pretty much ignored theirs. Their biggest creators, both video creators and native publishers, are not only absent from pretty much all publicity the company does, but the platform’s algorithmic tweaks over the years seem to be actively antagonistic to them, which has, it seems, only made the surviving creators and the content they produce more aggressively shameless.
Basically, Facebook and Instagram is Squid Game, the algorithm is the big piggy bank, and the last three traumatized contestants in tuxedos armed with knives are an out-of-work magician, an antivax chiropractor, and a QAnon mom from Tuscon who runs a drop-shipping pyramid scheme.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
The UK updates its Online Safety Bill proposal to outlaw content featuring revenge porn, drug and weapons dealing, suicide promotion, people smuggling, and more
Britain takes aim at online fraud, revenge porn with beefed-up rules for Big Tech
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/britain-beefs-up-online-safety-bill-with-new-criminal-offences.html
Britain’s landmark Online Safety Bill seeks to combat the spread of harmful and illegal content on social media sites including Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.
Lawmakers have called on the government to add more offences to the scope of the law, such as self harm, racial abuse and scam advertising.
The bill will now include provisions outlawing content that features revenge porn, drug and weapons dealing, suicide promotion and people smuggling.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ian Bogost / The Atlantic:
Digital assets like NFTs give us a glimpse into a future where every aspect of human life that can be digitally recorded is collateralized and securitized
The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now
The internet has always financialized our lives. Web3 just makes that explicit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/future-internet-blockchain-investment-banking/621480/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway?
There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on a blockchain.” In marketing for the new feature, the company offered an even briefer take: “digital items that you own.” That promise, mated to a flood of interest and wealth in the cryptocurrency markets used to exchange them, has created an NFT gold rush over the past year. Last March, the artist known as Beeple sold an NFT at auction for $69.5 million. The digital sculptor Refik Anadol, one of the artists The Alantic commissioned to imagine a COVID-19 memorial in 2020, has brought in millions selling editions of his studio’s work in NFT form. Jonathan Mann, who started writing a song every day when he couldn’t find a job after the 2008 financial collapse, began selling those songs as NFTs, converting a fun internet hobby into a viable living.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/04/copyright-what-you-need-to-know/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Unpacking Meta’s “regulatory headwinds” warning, as the adtech industry faces a privacy reckoning and Belgium upends IAB Europe’s GDPR compliance framework
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/04/on-metas-regulatory-headwinds-and-adtechs-privacy-reckoning/
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Lazier” Web Scraping Is Better Web Scraping
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/07/lazier-web-scraping-is-better-web-scraping/
Ever needed to get data from a web page? Parsing the content for data is called web scraping, and [Doug Guthrie] has a few tips for making the process of digging data out of a web page simpler and more efficient, complete with code examples in Python. He uses getting data from Yahoo Finance as an example, because it’s apparently a pretty common use case judging by how often questions about it pop up on Stack Overflow. The general concepts are pretty widely applicable, however.
The Alternative to Web Scraping
The “lazy” programmer’s guide to faster, more efficient retrieval of web data
https://towardsdatascience.com/the-alternative-to-web-scraping-8d530ae705ca
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/08/wordle-reverse-engineering-and-automated-solving/
Tomi Engdahl says:
While the suggestion appears to just be posturing, some top politicians in Europe seem almost hilariously unphased by the proposition.
Meta Suggests It May Close Facebook and Instagram In European Union
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/meta-suggests-it-may-close-facebook-and-instagram-in-european-union/
BY TOM HALE
09 FEB 2022, 09:39
Meta suggests it may have to shut down Facebook and Instagram in the European Union (EU) if it’s no longer able to transfer data across the Atlantic between Europe and the US. While the suggestion appears to just be posturing, some top politicians in Europe seem almost hilariously unphased by the proposition.
Meta’s suggestion was quietly mentioned in the company’s annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week. The remarks regard new EU legalization currently being drawn up that would require data processing service providers to set up safeguards against illegal data transfers to non-EU governments.
“If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe,” the reports reads. It adds that this would significantly impact their business and finances.
In July 2020, Europe’s top court struck down the transatlantic data transfer deal known as the Privacy Shield. The EU and the US have been looking to reach a new accord, but no solid agreement has yet been found.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/google-is-no-longer-the-worlds-most-popular-website/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jon Porter / The Verge:
The UK’s CMA accepts Google’s plan to phase out and replace third-party cookies with the Privacy Sandbox and will closely monitor the product’s development — The UK’s competition regulator will keep a ‘close eye’ on development — Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies and replace …
Google’s Privacy Sandbox ad-tracking overhaul clears major regulatory hurdle
The UK’s competition regulator will keep a ‘close eye’ on development
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/11/22814204/google-chrome-third-party-cookies-privacy-sandbox-uk-competition-and-markets-authority-regulator?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zoner lisäsi älyä Google-mainontaan ja sai 118 % enemmän kauppoja
https://www.hopkins.fi/kokemuksia/zoner/
Tomi Engdahl says:
UK Competition Watchdog Gives Cautious Approval To Google’s Privacy Sandbox
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2022/02/11/uk-competition-watchdog-gives-cautious-approval-to-googles-privacy-sandbox/
The UK’s competition watchdog has accepted changes to Google’s Privacy Sandbox, but says it will ‘keep a close eye’ on the company.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was investigating proposals from Google to replace third-party cookies with a new set of standards known as the Privacy Sandbox.
It had been concerned that the move could entrench Google’s dominant position in online advertising, with advertisers only able to see aggregated information about user groups.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla and Meta (Facebook) are now actually working together
The companies are working together on a new proposal for ad interaction tracking
https://www.xda-developers.com/mozilla-meta-interoperable-private-attribution/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s adtech targeted by publisher antitrust complaint in EU
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/11/epc-google-antitrust-complaint/
Tomi Engdahl says:
MITEN TIEDOSTAVA MILLENNIAALI HAASTAA MARKKINOIJAN?
https://parcero.fi/blogi/edistyksellinen-y-sukupolvi-pitaa-tasa-arvoa-itsestaanselvyytena/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://grapevine.fi/kuluttajabrandi-huomioi-nama-uudet-ilmiot-sosiaalisen-mediasi-suunnittelussa/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meta has BILLION$ of reasons not to leave the EU
Absolutely not threatening to do it
https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-not-leaving-eu-facebook-instagram-analysis#Echobox=1644411829
Tomi Engdahl says:
The.com launches a low-code, collaborative website builder that uses customizable ‘blocks,’ not templates
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/27/the-com-launches-a-low-code-collaborative-website-builder-that-uses-customizable-blocks-not-templates/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://lovidea.com/digimarkkinoinnin-vuosi-2022-ja-fomo/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Zuck being extremely open about the design of Facebook. Absolutely fascinating.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jälleen uusi kolaus Google Analyticsin käytölle verkkosivustolle annettiin kuukausi aikaa lopettaa palvelun käyttö https://www.tivi.fi/uutiset/tv/6f27534b-8a23-4698-9112-ff340cea4abe
Ranskan tietosuojaviranomainen CNIL on linjannut, että Google Analytics -palvelun käyttö voi rikkoa EU:n tietosuoja-asetusta eli gdpr:ää. Tammikuussa Google Analyticsin käytön linjattiin rikkovan gdpr:ää Itävallassa. Tämän seurauksena Itävallan tietosuojaviranomainen kielsi Google Analyticsin jatkuvan käytön.
Google Analytics on erittäin laajalti käytetty verkkosivustojen analytiikkapalvelu, jolla seurataan sivustojen kävijämääriä ja liikennettä.
Tomi Engdahl says:
En kauheasti luottaisi siihen yliopiston mediatiedotteeseen
https://www.tiede.fi/blogit/kaiken-takana-loinen/en-kauheasti-luottaisi-siihen-yliopiston-mediatiedotteeseen
Tammikuussa Rantala kanssakirjoittajineen julkaisi tutkimusartikkelin, jonka perusteella Turun yliopisto julkaisi mediatiedote/uutisen. Mediatiedotteesta kanneltiin Turun yliopiston rehtorille, joka käynnisti asiasta esiselvityksen (pdf). Esiselvityksen perusteella mediatiedotteessa oli vastuuttomia väitteitä, ja koska Rantala ei vaatinut varsinaista tutkintaa, yliopiston rehtori päätti (pdf) Rantalan toimineen vastuuttomasti.
Hyvän tieteellisen käytännön loukkaukset jakautuvat vilppiin, piittaamattomuuteen ja muihin vastuuttomuuksiin. Vilppi on julkisuudessa ehkä kaikkein puhutuin: siihen liittyy havaintojen vääristely ja sepittäminen tai esimerkiksi plagiointi.
Piittaamattomuus hyvästä tieteellisestä käytännöstä puolestaan tarkoittaa esimerkiksi muiden tutkijoiden vähättelyä, tutkimusaineistojen puutteellista säilyttämistä tai huolimatonta raportointia. Muita vastuuttomia menettelyjä ovat esimerkiksi muiden tutkijoiden työn epäasiallinen vaikeuttaminen, omien ansioiden paisuttelu tai, Rantalan tapauksessa, ”yleisön harhauttaminen esittämällä julkisuudessa harhaanjohtavia tai vääristeleviä tietoja omasta tutkimuksesta, sen tuloksista, tulosten tieteellisestä merkityksestä tai niiden sovellettavuudesta”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple broke Facebook’s ad machine. Who’s going to fix it?
A $250 billion question.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22929715/facebook-apple-ads-meta-privacy?utm_source=facebook&utm_content=recode&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=vox.social
Facebook built one of the most amazing money machines the world has ever seen. Then Apple came and threw a wrench in the gears.
That’s one of the narratives that sprang from last week’s news, when Facebook’s parent company Meta delivered an alarming earnings report to Wall Street, which promptly cut an astonishing $250 billion out of the company’s value in a single day — a 26 percent drop. And there were a lot of narratives.
For a large and vocal group of Facebook haters, the stock crash was a chance to reaffirm your priors: If you thought Facebook was getting comeuppance for creating a toxic product that made the world worse, you could point to its first-ever loss of users.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
A key EU lawmaker steering negotiations over the Digital Services Act says she is “optimistic we can make a deal before the end of June” — European Union lawmakers and countries could reach a deal by the end of June on proposed tech rules forcing online platforms to better police …
Deal on EU tech rules possible by June, key lawmaker says
https://www.reuters.com/technology/deal-eu-tech-rules-possible-by-june-key-lawmaker-says-2022-02-14/
Tomi Engdahl says:
How does a moden company know that their ad campaign was successful – the incoming traffic crashes their web site and thus they can’t make any sales.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Americans Have Even Less Trust In Scientists Now Than Pre-Pandemic, Poll Finds—Especially Among Republicans
https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Falisondurkee%2F2022%2F02%2F15%2Famericans-have-even-less-trust-in-scientists-now-than-pre-pandemic-poll-finds-especially-among-republicans%2F%3Futm_campaign%3Dforbes%26utm_source%3Dfacebook%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_term%3DGordie&h=AT2BAOoW-DjM9t90zCw6DZYKIPvIGQMKnj3Z4K2tLfXkkG7xrQ5jwp6UmXmr7Hfe38vJlLFkTHrEMrSNGs2Vj01AxGUsj44ZIf544XCIxTjMwomjxjYk-LDTkJU_kNbHjQ
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
LinkedIn profiles show TikTok has hired over 190 European content moderators from Accenture and others since January 2021, as its European business explodes
TikTok poaches content moderators from Big Tech contractors in Europe
https://www.ft.com/content/d03c945b-ed5b-425b-8817-acb236f60931
Tomi Engdahl says:
DKB:
Google search quality is declining because of too many ads, SEO, and “smart” AI, prompting people to append “reddit” to queries to get more authentic results — Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit …
Google Search Is Dying
https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying
Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.
Paul Graham thinks this image means Reddit as a social media site “still hasn’t peaked”. What it actually means is that the amount of people using Reddit as a search engine is growing.
How do we know Google is dying?
If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to shit. You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.
Google still gives decent results for many other categories, especially when it comes to factual information. You might think that Google results are pretty good for you, and you have no idea what I’m talking about.
What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search. You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result.
Why is Google dying?
Ads
It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines. The founders of Google pointed this out themselves when they were just getting started.
SEO
There are tons of people whose sole job is to game their way to the top of Google, so it shouldn’t be surprising when search results deteriorate in quality. To be fair, this would probably be an issue with any search engine, but you’d expect Google to be able to come up with a less gameable algorithm.
Here’s a fun story about how one website gamed their way to the top of Google in Norway.
AI
Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant”, in addition to personalizing things for you. If you really meant exactly what you typed, then all bets are off.
Even the exact match query operator (“ ”) doesn’t give exact matches anymore, which is quite bizarre.
Google claims the exact matching feature is merely unintuitive, not broken
Tomi Engdahl says:
Eric Benjamin Seufert / Mobile Dev Memo:
An in-depth look at Privacy Sandbox for Android: a two-year transition with ad industry input, a marked change from Apple’s ATT, which had little external input
RIP GAID: Privacy Sandbox is coming to Android. What advertisers need to know.
https://mobiledevmemo.com/rip-gaid-privacy-sandbox-is-coming-to-android-heres-a-summary-of-the-tech/
This morning, Google announced plans to bring a Privacy Sandbox effort to Android. Google’s original Privacy Sandbox initiative was introduced in 2019, and its stated purpose was to create a collaborative, open-source environment in which privacy technologies could be developed as web standards. The initative was undertaken shortly after Google announced that it would deprecate third-party cookies in the Chrome browser; the Privacy Sandbox was presented as a means of building tools and tehcnological approaches to preserving advertising efficacy while safeguarding user privacy in a way that third-party cookies didn’t.
Most mobile app marketers can be forgiven for a lack of familiarity with the Privacy Sandbox and the sometimes cryptically-named tools and frameworks that comprise it: FLoC, TURTLEDOVE, the Topics API etc. The Privacy Sandbox was designed to solve a specific problem that mostly is irrelevant to app advertisers: replacing third-party cookies with a privacy-preserving yet effective apparatus for targeting advertising. In large part, mobile app advertisers aren’t concerned with cookie deprecation because they primarily advertise within apps, and not on the web. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy framework, rolled out last year, created frictions for mobile app advertisers (and mobile web advertisers) through the deprecation of the iOS device identifier, the IDFA, as a form of consumer privacy protection.
https://privacysandbox.com/android/#how-works-on-apps-hero
Tomi Engdahl says:
This journalist’s Otter.ai scare is a reminder that cloud transcription isn’t completely private
A reminder of the tradeoffs for ease and simplicity
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/16/22937766/go-read-this-otter-ai-transcription-data-privacy-report
A report recently published by Politico about the automated transcription service Otter.ai serves as a great reminder of how difficult it can be to keep things truly private in the age of cloud-based services. It starts off with a nerve-wracking story — the journalist interviewed Mustafa Aksu, a Uyghur human rights activist who could be a target of surveillance from the Chinese government. But though they took pains to keep their communication confidential, they used Otter to record the call — and a day later, they received a message from Otter asking about the purpose of the conversation with Aksu.
Obviously, it was a concerning email. After receiving mixed messages from an Otter support agent about whether the survey was real or not, the reporter went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what had happened. He details his dive into the service’s privacy policy (which does let Otter share some info with third parties), and lays out how the ease and utility of transcription software can override critical thinking about where potentially sensitive data is ending up.
My journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favorite app
Otter.ai has saved reporters countless hours transcribing interviews. Caveat emptor.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/16/my-journey-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-every-journalists-favorite-app-00009216
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla warns Chrome, Firefox 100 user agents may break sites https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-warns-chrome-firefox-100-user-agents-may-break-sites/
Mozilla is warning website developers that the upcoming Firefox 100 and Chrome 100 versions may break websites when parsing user-agent strings containing three-digit version numbers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andrew Blok / CNET:
YouTube details new efforts to stop misinformation, including stopping such content before it goes viral and limiting cross-platform sharing of misinformation — Stopping misinformation before it goes viral is a top goal for the video site. … YouTube outlined on Thursday new efforts it plans to undertake to tackle misinformation.
YouTube Eyes New Ways to Stop Misinformation From Spreading Beyond Its Reach
Stopping misinformation before it goes viral is a top goal for the video site.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/social-media/youtube-eyes-new-ways-to-stop-misinformation-from-spreading-beyond-its-reach/
YouTube outlined on Thursday new efforts it plans to undertake to tackle misinformation. Stopping misinformation before it goes viral, limiting cross-platform sharing of misinformation and better addressing misinformation in languages other than English are three areas of focus, YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, said in a blog post.
YouTube’s attention to cross-platform sharing would limit views of videos that are borderline cases under the company’s current misinformation guidelines. YouTube says adjustments to its recommendation system have greatly reduced consumption of these borderline videos on its platform, but traffic from other sites embedding and linking to these videos remains a problem. Possible fixes include disabling the share button or breaking links to videos that’ve already been suppressed on YouTube, Mohan said. Warnings that a video could include misinformation are another possible fix and something YouTube employs for graphic and age-restricted content.
Inside Responsibility: What’s next on our misinfo efforts
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/inside-responsibility-whats-next-on-our-misinfo-efforts/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Mozilla warns that Firefox and Chrome 100 versions may break some sites, including HBO Go and Yahoo, due to user-agent strings with three-digit version numbers
Mozilla warns Chrome, Firefox ‘100’ user agents may break sites
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-warns-chrome-firefox-100-user-agents-may-break-sites/
Mozilla is warning website developers that the upcoming Firefox 100 and Chrome 100 versions may break websites when parsing user-agent strings containing three-digit version numbers.
A user-agent is a string used by a web browser that includes information about the software, such as the browser name, its version number, and the various technologies it uses.
When a person visits a website, the browser’s user-agent is sent along with the request for a web page. This allows the web page to check the visitor’s browser version and modify its response based on the features the browser supports.
For example, the current user-agent for Mozilla Firefox version 97 is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:97.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/97.0
Note, if you have the Firefox ‘privacy.resistFingerprinting’ setting set to ‘True,’ your user-agent will be locked to ‘Firefox/78.0.’
For the current version of Google Chrome 98, the user-agent is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.82 Safari/537.36
Mozilla warns of version 100 user-agent strings
In August 2021, Mozilla launched an experiment to see if the three-digit ‘Firefox/100′ user-agent string would cause problems with websites. Google soon followed with their own experiment for Chrome 100.
In both experiments, Mozilla and Google found a small number of websites that would not operate correctly when parsing a user-agent string that contained a three-digit version number.
Since then, Mozilla has been keeping track of web bugs caused by the version 100 change and has found problems on websites for HBO Go, Bethesda, Yahoo, Slack, and those created by the Duda website builder.
For the most part, these issues have ranged from the websites stating the browser is unsupported to user interface issues affecting portions of the site.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bad boomer memes aren’t the only problem.
Viral Thread Reveals How COVID Misinformation Gets Into Top News Outlets And Medical Journals
https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/viral-thread-reveals-how-covid-misinformation-gets-into-top-news-outlets-and-medical-journals/
There’s a whole lot of COVID misinformation out there, from whether or not the vaccines are safe in pregnancy (they are) to whether or not they are responsible for your cousin’s friend’s gigantic balls (they aren’t.)
It can be tempting to assume that all such rumors are the result of bad boomer memes on social media, but sometimes it’s possible to wind up believing false claims through perfectly cromulent outlets. As a viral Twitter thread from University College Dublin Professor of Architecture Orla Hegarty has recently shown, it’s all too easy sometimes for a soundbite to become received wisdom – even when that soundbite isn’t in fact accurate.
Despite Hegarty’s warnings, the journalist went ahead with the piece – “one in 1,000” statistic included. Soon it had been picked up in the UK press, who mysteriously cited the HPSC reply as “a study,” and before long, the factoid had spread across the world.
And despite Irish health officials pointing out that the figures were misleading, things then got even weirder. The “one in 1,000” statistic – which, just to remind you, was a back-of-an-envelope calculation done by a journalist who had already been told it was inaccurate – started turning up in academic papers.
It even made it into the British Medical Journal.
Lawmakers and special interest groups started lobbying for it to be used to inform public health policy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
WordPress 5.9 Just Dropped And It Has FULL SITE EDITING!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAgHAiELzD4
Are you ready for WordPress 5.9? Well, if you’re ready or not, it’s here! Full site editing is finally here in WordPress Gutenberg. Is Gutenberg going to compete with page builders now? Could be. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
//*
Video Table of Contents
00:00 WordPress 5.9 Changes Overview
01:29 Full Site Editing
02:29 Editing the header in WordPress 5.9
03:54 Using the new Navigation Block
11:55 How to edit the footer
14:35 Where to create custom templates blocks
17:40 New editor styling
19:14 Finding editor-compatible themes
20:42 New gallery block options
Viewer comments:
I wish they had introduced this earlier. I feel so many of us have got used to using other page builders that feel very natural to use. I’m sure this is intuitive, but it does feel different, so may take time to get used to. Integration into the core can only be a good thing, but will I change from other page builders?, not yet.
I think it’s definitely an improvement but it still has a long way to go.
It will take so much time for it to reach to the level of the best page builders out there.
Thank you for the quick breakdown. This is a big change.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here comes the web browser 100 problem
Google Chrome and Firefox will both soon release their 100th version — and that could mean trouble for both website developers and web browser users.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/here-comes-the-web-browser-100-problem/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/17/how-to-grow-your-organic-traffic-with-earned-media/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Näin viet valmennuksesi verkkoon ja moninkertaistat maineesi ja ansaintasi
https://www.digivallankumous.fi/asiantuntijabisnes/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/the-einstein-effect-youre-more-likely-to-believe-bs-if-you-think-a-scientist-said-it/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://elementor.com/blog/web-design-trends/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/road-to-freedom/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aleksis Salusjärven kolumni: Seitsemän sekunnin muisti – mitä tapahtuu, jos keskittymiskyvyn alamäki jatkuu
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12279268
Lyhytvideot ja pikaviestit ovat looginen lopputulos vuosikymmenten ajan lyhenneestä keskittymiskyvystä. Olemme astumassa muistin jälkeiseen aikaan, kirjoittaa Salusjärvi. Kolumnin voi myös kuunnella.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/1680575522261842/posts/3236137213372324/
Google Analyticsin käyttö on todettu laittomaksi tuoreessa viranomaispäätöksessä. Tässä on 3 vaihtoehtoista tapaa toimia vallitsevassa tilanteessa:
1️⃣ Odota ja seuraa tilannetta. Google on luvannut tuovansa tapoja kontrolloida datankeruuta. Seuraavia viranomaisten ja oikeusistuimien ratkaisujakin vielä odotellaan.
2️⃣ Korjaa tietosuojaongelmia asentamalla Google Analytics server-side tagging -menetelmällä. Tämä mahdollistaa IP-osoitteiden ja muiden tunnisteiden puhdistamisen datasta ennen kuin se lähetetään Googlelle.
3️⃣ Vaihda Google Analytics ohjelmistoon, joka on eurooppalaisessa omistuksessa ja jonka data säilytetään EU:n sisällä.
Lue katsaus tilanteesta ja vaihtoehdoista: https://www.hopkins.fi/artikkelit/onko-google-analytics-laiton/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=artikkeli-galaiton&utm_content=pagepost
Tomi Engdahl says:
Did we learn nothing from Y2K? Why are some coders still stuck on two digit numbers? > https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2022/02/25/did-we-learn-nothing-from-y2k-why-are-some-coders-still-stuck-on-two-digit-numbers/