WordPress buying Tumblr

WordPress.com own­er Automat­tic that has last week been report­ed to pur­chase rival Microbloging site Tum­blr. The deal is being report­ed to be below $3 Mil­lion, far below the hyper val­u­a­tion of $1.1 Bil­lion that Yahoo paid in 2013. Back then Yahoo was buy­ing lots of start up com­pa­nies as part of a revi­tal­i­sa­tion dri­ve by …

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Twitter to now disclose when public figures break the rules

They won’t remove them though… This fol­lows up a post back in 2018, that Twit­ter would not block world lead­ers. Whilst not nam­ing a par­tic­u­lar politi­cian, I think we all have an idea on who they are refer­ring to, Twit­ter will hide by default, but not remove tweets which break their rules. From Twit­ters blog post …

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Flickr going back to its old subscription model

How­ev­er for free users this will mean that pho­tos will be delet­ed. Back in April, Flickr was acquired from Yahoo by Smug­mug, this rep­re­sents a major change in direc­tion for Flickr under them than Yahoo, and a return to Flickrs sub­scrip­tion based roots. Orig­i­nal­ly, Flickr would let you upload 200 pho­tos on free accounts, then …

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On that whole Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Thing

In the big sto­ry that explod­ed last week, and has been doing the rounds for a while. A data ana­lyt­ics / per­son­al pro­fil­ing / elec­tion cam­paign assis­tance com­pa­ny used per­son­al and pri­vate data they scrapped from Face­book via a researchers quiz app. They then used this in to help influ­ence the US elec­tion, and possibly …

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Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Fol­low­ing the announce­ment of the death of John Per­ry Bar­low, I’ve been re-read­­ing some of his writ­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Dec­la­ra­tion of the inde­pen­dence of cyber­space, A doc­u­ment that could be said to be the found­ing of inter­net cul­ture, even if a bit naive in how the tech­nol­o­gy would be used. You claim there are prob­lems among …

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Algorithm changes on Instagram hiding posts

Insta­gram has changed their algo­rithm again. Now they are said to be hid­ing some posts, so they don’t appear in feeds. I’ve noticed that I don’t see as many pho­tos in my feed any­more (at least from peo­ple I fol­low direct­ly, I have noticed an increase in brand­ed con­tent, and pho­tos I may like). Also likes seem …

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Twitter won’t block world leaders

Twit­ter, on why they won’t sus­pend Trump (or oth­er world lead­ers) accounts. Block­ing a world leader from Twit­ter or remov­ing their con­tro­ver­sial Tweets would hide impor­tant infor­ma­tion peo­ple should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would cer­tain­ly ham­per nec­es­sary dis­cus­sion around their words and actions. World …

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