For years [about 30] I used to tell students that they should register their name as a domain name and set up their own web page.
Now that artificial intelligence dominates search [apparently] and folk ignore search engines and social platforms when researching people [eg for job applications] that advice is more than ever relevant.
What could be better than your own CV that can be changed only by you?
This research is from the USA where Amazon dominates e-commerce and so I would expect that figure to be lower over here. If they're honest [are there any who are? 😏] I think those folk selling AI would be disappointed at these results.
The headline of this article says "Influencers Are Still Making Their Mark with Gen Z" ... but is that the case when none of the numbers are over 50%? And what about the research methodology ... what is a 'celebrity or influencer'? eg if you follow one sports person do you appear in this survey's results.
This map - is it a map? - is the result in the search featured in the previous post. It's a town-centre shopping precinct which could be in just about any town or city in the UK. Ho hum.
Sunderland is in the county of Tyne and Wear ... Durham is a city about 20 miles from Sunderland. No excuse. None.
Saw this 'tip' from a source I normally value. But: it's for writing website content - so not thousands of words - so wouldn't it be quicker, and more effective, to just write it off the top of your head and not use ai?
... now you don't. A lack of testing, methinks [and poor design in the first place].
A few weeks ago I posted a story of a business where the opening hours were hard to find. Well, here's an example of good practice. This is from the google listing for a business, with the search being outside it's hours of business. Note that after you've set it up, Google does the work for you.
Five million impressions for an ad that seems to be for a podcast 🤔
Whatever it's about, why did the advertiser/X think I would be interested?
... these numbers seem a little generous to me, I'd like to see the research methodology 🤔
Well worth 20 mins of your time. From the excellent Hannah Fry ... Why AI Agents are either the best or worst thing we’ve ever built.
... 'Grok can make mistakes', [you should] 'verify its outputs'.
In case you're not a follower of football: it was 2-0 at half time [surely every report on this match anywhere on the web would have reported this correctly], particularly as the third goal [on the hour mark] came in the second half. If an LLM can get something as simple and obvious as this wrong, why would to trust it for anything important?
... which featured a promotion for 'Lessons from the Web Performance Summit 2026' which featured 'More than 100 corporate digital communications professionals from many of Europe’s biggest companies'.
Well, I'm sure those folk know there own organizations, but how much can they offer marketers that run digital communications for organization's that are smaller than Europe’s biggest companies?
Previously I've commended Bowen Craggs on the way their website handles cookies - but it seems the space for users to read the content with the cookie message in place has shrunk a bit [the box I've highlighted in yellow].
But things get even worse on a phone's screen - it's the bit at the bottom [again, in yellow.
This morning I was going to visit an antiques/collectibles shop about an hour away from my home. Because most antiques stores do not keep 9-5, 7 days a week opening hours, before setting off I thought I would check on their website if it was open today. There was no website, only social media pages - none of which included the basic details of the business [just a lot of nice pictures]. I eventually found a phone number and gave it a ring. Landline number, no answer. Is it closed today? Will it be open later? Are they on holiday this week? One thing is certain: they won't be taking any money off me today. Or perhaps ever.
Moral? Well, it could be; read my book - but I'll go with: have a basic web page with 'about', 'address', 'contact details' and 'opening hours' [you can get these for next-to-nothing when you buy a domain name], or have these details on the home/pinned page of any social media presence. Or go old school and have an answerphone message saying 'sorry, we're closed at the moment, our opening hours are ...'.
Customers can be hard to find, don't make it hard for them to find you.
Update: several hours after originally publishing this post - and because I wanted to follow up this post, not because I was desperate to visit them - I had another go at finding some opening hours ... and after a bit of digging, found them. Ho hum.
After attending a Premier League football match, I was invited to complete a questionnaire about my match-day experience. All fairly standard stuff, but there was one key question missing: what time I arrived at the stadium. I got there an hour before kick off - effectively, one of the first to experience the various elements of the event so, no queues. I'm pretty sure folks arriving after me would have had a very different experience.
This notice popped up at the end of a purchase. Sound idea, provides a bit of marketing data [not sure how much], but I was logged-on to the site - so technology should have been designed to recognise this. To be fair, when I clicked on 'other', one of the options was 'shopped here before', but that should have been in the original list. As with most [all?] of these feedback forms, I was willing to offer a couple of quick clicks ... but I gave up after four clicks and was then asked to write something🤷. I left the site at that point. Surely the site's data collection is set up to show how many folk start, but don't finish, the feedback.
Short? What's a short? I checked the website of the organization in the ad - and I couldn't find where it is based. Maybe it doesn't actually exist ... and a short is from the imagination of of artificial intelligence.
I think this research offers something for online retailers - but there is something missing. What is the total number of folk being represented here? It is not - for example, 33% of a population - it is a percentage of folk who have purchased from a social media platform.
Oh, and what does the statement 'purchased on social media' mean? I would say it means that no other website was involved in placing an order and paying for it. If you click on a link on the social media platform which takes you to a website's purchase page, I don't think the purchase was made on the SM platform. I wonder what the respondents thought?
And finally ... the survey's title. Shouldn't it be; 'Social media platforms that are most popular for shopping'.
I've bunched these together because I have no idea what is being advertised in any of them. I would suggest that for at least some of them, the product - or service - is so specialised that actual customers could be identified ... and so contacted directly.
If you want more reviews, make them quick and easy ... don't ask them to write an essay.
I'll stick with my old MR2 thank you. As always check out the stats at the bottom. A quick glance at the comments show they are mainly folk doing the same as me and taking the p*ss.
Apparently the terms of service for Microsoft's Copilot say it's for entertainment purposes only, that it can make mistakes and may not work as intended ... and that users should not rely on it for important advice.
March 2026: A court case in the US over a woman's childhood addiction to social media which Meta and YouTube lost brought the dangers of social media into the public realm. Again. Those issues are beyond the scope of this blog's subject area, but halting them is not. The social media platforms exist only by selling advertising on them. And marketers pay for those adverts. Ergo, if marketers stopped buying that advertising space the social media platforms would close. End of problem.
I've subscribed to a number of email newsletters - some of which provide me with posts for this blog, others on a range of subjects including sport. Many of these newsletters include links to web pages.
Those websites must recognise that I've arrived from a subscribed email. So why - usually seconds after the page has downloaded - do I get messages asking/advising me to subscribe to the newsletter?
... plugs right into your pipeline via API and having instant access to M4 runners, automated code signing and zero hardware to manage? [and yes, I realise that the end of that sentence doesn't make sense, but I just copies it from the ad😏]
Anybody any idea what the product in this ad does? Or who would use it? The interaction would suggest that most of the 641 thousand folk who have had it delivered on their 'X' feed are like me and have no idea.
One of the first things I advised folk about website design back in the mid 1990s was 'light background, dark text' - black on white is best [like every book you've ever read]. This is why ... I put the red arrow on to help you find the text 😏]
A tad off-subject, but On Becoming a Cyborg is the best article on the use of AI that I have seen.
Binders apparently 🤷 I didn't think they were still a thing in the digital age. 469 thousand 'views' - not cheap.
On this site the 'subscribe' notice was fixed ie no 'cancel' or 'x'. To get rid of it, you had to sign up. The notice didn't block much of the page, but users couldn't see all of the content.
I have no idea what this ad is for 🤷
Note that of the 103 thousand 'views' this ad has gathered, only one person added a comment - and that comment was to repeat the ad. Ho hum.
Full marks to this young lady for taking money off of folk who want their friends to think they were at a concert. She's paid to take a photo of her customer's social media profile on her phone at the actual venue. Customers then post it with comment "me at whoever concert" with the stage in the background.
Minus marks to anyone sad enough to want to post on their social media pages that they've done something they haven't.
This is in Brazil - got to assume there's the same kind of 'phone banks' all over the likes of China, Russia and India?
Link to video on X
OK, so maybe it's a problem for those who are a little later in life - but it is a usability issue caused by, well ... no reason.
The problem is similar for the UK's two biggest car-park payment apps - BayByPhone and JustPark - and the issue is that both of their logos are different online and on app ...
Of course the designers [who are unlikely to be later in life] would say web and app icons are similar enough - but that's the problem. When you're in a car park, and it's raining or the sun is shining on your phone's screen and the notice has words and no logo, or the 'web' logo and your phone just shows icons ... which is which? Oh, and the two companies using the same colours doesn't help.
It's a problem that simply doesn't need to exist.
