1. The era of the search engine traffic strategy

I spent a good ten years knee-deep in SEO and building content strategies for scale publishers around search, but as some of you will know I think that era is over. It’s almost a year since I published an article which outlined why I think so (LLMs change the game) and later looked at what publishers can do to respond. I missed the Gartner study from February which drew much the same conclusions.

I also wrote about how this would impact affiliate revenue, which has been the great strategic play which kept many scale publishers afloat, and which they have now invested heavily in. My perspective was that in three to five years it was probably toast, but things move fast — for example, Google is now experimenting with a feed of products for you in shopping. All in all, publishers need to remember that platforms serve their own interests, and really will kill anyone else if they feel like it. Own your own content strategy.

I’m no longer as immersed in that world, but from what I hear on the grapevine everyone is either waiting for the shoe to drop or is pedaling furiously to stay in much the same place. All of this is masked of course by Google’s other algo-twiddling, but the long term trend remains the same: search is dead, baby. Search is dead.

2. Who could possibly have predicted this?

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that young men who listen a lot to Joe Rogan tilt towards supporting Donald Trump. Of course this has a lot of people wringing their hands and blaming right wing influencers etc etc.

And there’s a kernel of truth there. But literally in the third paragraph it also notes that the percentage is… 75 to 18 favorable to Joe Biden, even in this demographic. Generally it’s 88-6.

What can you make of this? Well not as much as the NYT would love to make. I would love to have access to the full data so I could crunch it, but it seems to me that young men listening to and enjoying a consistently right-wing idiotic podcast are more likely to skew to the right. And they aren’t event skewing to the right much. I’m sure the Democrats would take a 75-18 split in the general election.

Meanwhile the NYT itself consistently makes life easy for the right wing, by excluding trans voices from its coverage of gender issues to holding Trump to lower standards than Biden to downplaying Trump’s threats to democracy. Maybe look closer to home, people?

3. The paranoid turn

Something is rotten in the state of WordPress. I’m finding it hard to keep up, but thankfully The Internet Provides.

My own personal bit of this: I’m currently hosting this on WordPress.com, but I’m likely to shift in the near future. I’m taking the opportunity to reevaluate how I use my domains, so there will be some change here. What I am thinking of is converting my “name” domain to just be a relatively static site about me and what I do, and using my Technovia domain to, once again, be a blog. That runs on Micro.blog, which I like very much, but I think I’m likely to use self-hosted WordPress for ianbetteridge.com.

I just don’t want to pay money to a company that’s clearly as noxious as WordPress. I don’t expect that to change anything about Mullenweg’s behaviour, but I am certainly not comfortable with rewarding it. The warning signs were there, I just ignored them for too long.

4. RIP uBlock (sorta)

Google has long had ad blockers in its sights, but simply banning them was always likely to attract the kind of heat towards its monopoly on browsers that the company could do without. Now that it seems possible Chrome will be taken away from the company, it no longer has to play nice, so it’s used the cover of Manifest v3 to rid the world of uBlock Origin.

Switch to Firefox. Or, if you must use a Chrome-based browser, try a DNS-based blocker, which will have the additional benefit of extra protection from malware. Whatever you do, don’t just keep using Chrome.

5. Microsoft leader to head up UK industrial body

I have no idea whether Clare Barclay is a good choice for this post on individual merit, but it’s pretty indicative of the state of UK industrial strategy that a software person ends up overseeing the British government’s industrial strategy. The UK doesn’t really have an industrial strategy: decades of failing to invest in either light or heavy industry have left it miles behind the likes of Germany, China, the US and many others. I recently went to Innotrans, the biannual global event for the rail industry, and the lack of big UK companies there surprised me. German and Chinese companies rule the globe, thanks to long-term thinking and not seeing selling off assets as “foreign investment”. Good luck to Barclay. She’ll need it.

6. Who could possibly have believed etc etc

Surprise! The robots at the Tesla Cybercab event were humans in disguise. Who could possibly have predicted this plot twist.

7. Remember Meetup?

I had almost forgotten it, despite it being something that I got a lot of value out of a while ago. Turns out that it’s now owned by the notorious Bending Spoons, a company that goes around buying up software and raising prices.

8. This is why monolithic app stores are bad

“We have to follow local laws” says Apple, Google, and every single major company in the world. Which is, mostly, fine and completely understandable. However, when the only option for installing software is a single app store, this also means the government has absolute control over what software a person in their country can run.

The latest example of this is Apple’s removal of the Current Time app from the Russian app store (you thought Russian sanctions meant Apple wasn’t operating there? Oh bless you). What is Current Time? It’s an “independent Russian-language media service and website run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)”. Radio Free Liberty, if you don’t know it, is funded by a grant from the US government in order to provide access to uncensored media to people in countries where what you can read and listen to is tightly controlled.

Yes, that’s right: a US company is removing an app funded by the US government, in order to keep on the right side of Vladimir Putin and what keep whatever profits they make from Russia.

It’s not the first time Apple has done this, of course. It also removed VPNs from the app store, so Russians couldn’t get access to uncensored media.

None of this would really matter if alternate, safe app stores could be installed. But they can’t. You have to jailbreak your phone, with all the attendant risks that involves (particularly in a repressive regime). But they aren’t, because Apple, Google and the rest would rather make a load of money than help global users have free access to information.

9. Hugo Barra, intelligent agents and Meta

I love Ben Thompson’s interviews, although they also frustrate me a little as a journalist because I think Ben sometimes lets his excitement over technology get the better of him. The most recent one with Hugo Barra is really interesting, as they focus on the next wave of user experience — a world of agents, rather than apps — which is something I’m solidly behind.

There is one point, though, where I think it would have been worth asking some harder questions. When talking about the future, Hugo mentions this:

HB: It’s all good, I think it was ChatGPT for me, and I haven’t stopped thinking it since. I do think that one of the great advantages that Meta has [compared to Apple] is the fact that it doesn’t have a legacy operating system that it needs to keep nourishing.

It’s true that Apple now has a lot of legacy in terms of tech that it would want to leverage and support. However, Meta has something that is arguably harder to move beyond: a business model, based on advertising. And agents, which deliver information to you in a proactive way, are incompatible with the advertising model which relies on putting content next to content. The point of agents is to filter out things you don’t want to see. Agents are opinionated, and they’re on the side of the person who is using them. It’s hard to see how ads fit into that world.

10. Just how close to WWIII were were in 1999?

This is a fascinating story: how General Sir Mike Jackson, who died recently, prevented NATO troops from ending in a firefight with Russians, effectively subverting a direct order from his US superior officer. Well worth a read.