Simon’s Blog

No, not that bacon.  I mean “tech bacon”.   What is bacon?  You know what spam is (tech spam, not the product that claims to be made of pork) - it’s unsolicited garbage e-mail.  Well, bacon is solicited garbage e-mail.  You know the kind of thing: Check out this offer on Amazon.com; or Hi Dave, [...]

I’ve been following Facebook’s targeted advertising platforms since they were launched. Now that they’ve been running for a while, I have to ask: are the targeted advertising systems Facebook offers to advertisers fundamentally broken? I think they might be. Here’s my top three reasons why:

The targeting doesn’t work. The ads I see [...]

The problem of blog comment spam continues to increase. I’ve now had around a quarter of a million spam comments posted to this blog since I started it; with new spam comments currently coming in at the rate of thousands per day. Almost all are automatically flagged by my spam filters; only tens are [...]

Back in May of this year, I wrote a post predicting that 2008 would see a renaissance in interest for using Java as platform for developing consumer applications. As we approach the end of 2007, it’s clear that innovation centered on making Java suitable for consumer applications is accelerating. If you’re a developer, [...]

Whether you believe the statistics in detail or not, there’s no doubt that the iPhone (and iPod Touch) web browser is doing amazingly well. That is, iPhone owners are making regular and substantial use of their browsers. This high level of mobile browser usage has never happened before. For sure, then, the browsing experience [...]