American economist Tyler Cowan writes about the educational impact the Australian social media ban for people under the age of sixteen could have: YouTube in particular, and sometimes X, are among the very best ways to learn about the world. To the extent that the law is effectively enforced, targeting YouTube will...

The term has been in use since 2002, and originally expressed a driver’s frustration towards another driver, who had indicated they wished to overtake them, by flashing their car headlights. Certain types of web content have seen the term’s context change somewhat: Rage bait is defined as “online content...

Nathan Powell writing for Mumbrella: A social media ban for under 16s will have six uncomfortable realities that policymakers will not tell you. But they matter, because they determine whether this decision actually protects young people, or simply creates new risks in new places. This is the polarising issue in...

A reader contacted me a few days after I mentioned blogging resource Problogger, and founder Darren Rowse, in a recent post. They were wondering if I knew anything about what’s happened at the site, or to Rowse himself, as no new content seems to have been posted since June 2024. For those coming in late, Problogger...

The suggestion, made by The Daily Aus (TDA), is that few Australians listened to local music in 2025. On Spotify at least. Zero local acts featured in Australia’s most listened-to artists, tracks, and albums on Spotify in 2025. You’ll have to go to Instagram (IG) to read the slide card since TDA mainly publish their...

Kurzgesagt making sense of a non-sensical universe: For decades, we’ve had a beautiful theory of the cosmos. One that explained how the universe began, what it’s made of, and how it’s supposed to behave. It matched our observations astonishingly well and made us feel like we’d almost deciphered the cosmic code. But...

Neocities, kind of born out of the ashes of once popular personal website hosting service Geocities, and Nekoweb, are on a mission to restore weird personal websites. With over one-point-three-million sites on their servers, Neocities, which was established in 2013, has made a substantial contribution. Nekoweb was...

Bring Back Doors. A hopefully growing list of hotels where there are doors to the room’s bathroom. I’ve emailed hundreds of hotels and I asked them two things: do your doors close all the way, and are they made of glass? Everyone that says yes to their doors closing, and no to being made of glass has been sorted by...

The Irish author, whose titles include Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends, wants United Kingdom royalties from her novels, and any screen adaptations made there, to go to Palestine Action, a British pro-Palestinian organisation. The British government however considers Palestine Action to be a terrorist...

Dave Winer, an American software developer and blogger, is working on a blog discourse system. In short, this is a blog commenting system, allowing you to comment on someone’s else blog post, potentially this one you’re reading right now, but via your own blog or website: The first thing to know is that all comments...

I started writing about newer blogs and personal websites earlier this year, and then somehow stopped. A busy year at work has been getting in the way of things as ever. Let’s try and get this going again, since there can’t be enough sharing of links within the blogosphere. Having said my focus was to feature newer...

The Australian dictionary’s word of the year committee were scathing, to say the least, of their pick: We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use. While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need...