The 'enshittification' of Google’s Blogger

When I started blogging as a pastime in late 2008, Google’s Blogger was a great choice of platforms. It was free and easy to use and had the financial backing of an internet powerhouse. I wasn’t worried about it disappearing like other platforms.
Also, in the first five years of blogging, I received annual checks of more than $100 each just for allowing advertisements on my Tech-media-tainment blog. Then there was a change in Google’s algorithms and traffic dried up.
Last week I removed the ads from Tech-media-tainment and canceled my revenue-sharing Google AdSense account. The reason was that Google kept increasing the ad counts on the page and the ads became increasingly intrusive.
Tech-media-tainment started with a static banner ad at the top of the page and another between the first and second articles. But that eventually changed to pop-up ads and advertisements on the top and left and right. The main ad forced users to manually close it like a window shade to read the article.
The last straw was when Google added contextual ads in the description of my blog: “Entertainment, pop culture, personal technology and media.” Google said it was an experiment, but I had no way to turn it off. It was ugly and confusing.
The changes at Google’s Blogger fit the definition of “enshittification,” where a service starts out user-friendly but becomes worse as the company increasingly tries to monetize it.
I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for Blogger. I’d hate to have to export all my work to another service like WordPress or Substack, because I don’t know what to expect there. Plus, that would be a ton of work and create a lot of dead links.
Even Google Gemini admits that Blogger is rarely updated anymore, calling it “an absolute relic of the early 2000s web.”
“There is always a tiny, looming fear that Google might ‘sunset’ it one day like they do with many legacy projects,” Gemini said. Does Google’s AI chatbot know something Google hasn’t said yet?

Porn parodies of public figures, a review of X-rated portrayals

The adult film industry has a history of poking fun at politicians, celebrities and other public figures in porn parodies. It is a peculiar way of humiliating a subject by literally stripping them of their modesty.
I recently set up a pair of websites on Google’s Blogger platform to list as many porn parodies of public figures as I could find. The first website, Porn Parodies Of Public Figures, is devoted to modern public figures, essentially those in the post-World War II era. The other, Porn Movies Based On Historical Figures, is for historical figures from ancient times up through WWII.
These websites feature censored photos of promotional artwork, such as physical media cover art. They are behind an age-restriction warning because of their subject matter.
I created the two websites to salvage a collection of images I had gathered and posted on Flickr. Flickr suspended my account in April, saying it violated the terms of its free photo-hosting service.
My interest in porn parodies of public figures stems from my support of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and curiosity over all that it covers. Freedom of speech and expression extends to parody and even sexual content.
But the golden age of porn parodies is over. It ended with the decline of physical media, such as DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.
Adult entertainment companies don’t seem interested in full-length features amid the rise of OnlyFans and other sites. Now anyone with a smartphone can film and distribute porn. And consumers of these videos don’t seem to mind the lack of narratives and acting (beyond faking gratification perhaps).
The closest the industry gets to parody now are cosplay videos, often for VR headsets. Porn actresses will dress up as characters from comic books, anime and other popular fiction. Rarely do they portray real people, except the occasional historical figure like Cleopatra or Pocahontas.
I suspect another issue could be AI deepfakes. With artificial intelligence, porn lovers can virtually put any celebrity or public figure into a sex video.
As of this posting, the most popular subject for porn parodies among modern public figures is President Donald Trump, who has been parodied since his days as host of NBC’s “The Apprentice.” He has been featured in 25 porn parodies to date.

Top real-life subjects of porn parodies:

Donald Trump (25)
Charlie Sheen (20)
Sarah Palin (15)
Barack Obama (13)
Kim Kardashian (11)
Britney Spears (10)
Melania Trump (10)
Tiger Woods (9)
Justin Bieber (8)
Marilyn Monroe (8)
Bill Clinton (7)
Lindsay Lohan (7)
Ivanka Trump (7)

Among historical eras and figures, Ancient Rome is the top subject of porn movies with 13 such movies. These include movies featuring Julius Caesar, Caligula and Mark Antony.

Top historical subjects (WWII or earlier) of porn movies:

Ancient Rome (13)
Cleopatra (11)
Giacomo Casanova (8)
Bonnie & Clyde (6)
Nazi Germany (6)

If you know of any movies I missed, let me know.

Photos: Porn actress Sammi Starfish plays U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). In this political satire, AOC meets with President Donald Trump to discuss her “Green New Deal” when sex happens.

Flickr shuts down my photo curation website

My offbeat journalistic exercise of reporting on public figures parodied by the adult video industry has run afoul of Flickr’s policies. They’ve suspended my account and blocked everyone except for me from seeing it.
My site documented all the times that porn studios have mocked politicians and celebrities in X-rated movies. It included promotional art and photos from those videos, which I censored when necessary.
But that wasn’t enough for Flickr. In fact, it was all just a money grab. I could keep doing what I was doing as long as I upgraded from a free to a paid account. But I already have a paid Flickr account for family and personal photos and I didn’t want a second one for this side endeavor.
Now, anyone looking to see how many times Donald Trump or Barack Obama has been parodied by the porn industry will get a 404 error page. More dead weblinks in an internet awash in them.
I have downloaded the photos from the “offending” Flickr page and have started uploading them to a new blog on Google’s Blogger service. (See Porn Parodies Of Public Figures.)
I’ve already had to do this several times before. (See links below.)

Related articles:

Tumblr needs to fix its handling of alleged copyright violations (Feb. 1, 2013)

Tumblr terminated my account, killed my three blogs (May 20, 2013)

LFL wardrobe malfunction photos moved to new website (Feb. 20, 2015)

Website attempts to make ‘sports hall of fame directory’

I like websites that specialize on a particular subject and become experts on that area.
That’s not the case with Tech-media-tainment but I have devoted a lot of time to several specific topics such as halls of fame.
I even created a Google map that features 564 (and counting) physical halls of fame that you can visit across sports, music, aviation and other endeavors in North America.
Plus, I have documented more than 180 interesting virtual halls of fame for business and industry, occupations, media and entertainment, food and drink, music, sports and other areas.
I recently came across a website called The Sports Fan Project that is attempting to compile a directory of sports halls of fame.
The Sports Fan Project Hall of Fame Directory is organized by location. It lists a total of 59 U.S. sports halls of fame and museums. Some 24 states and Puerto Rico are covered. It also names 10 international sports halls of fame and museums (in Australia, Canada, England, France, Israel, Japan and Malaysia).
It’s not an exhaustive list, but it covers the major sports pretty well.
However, it includes at least eight halls of fame that don’t have a physical location:

• Eastern States Exposition Equestrian Hall of Fame
• Legends of the Outdoors Hall of Fame
• National Powerboat Hall of Fame
• USA Bobsled & Skeleton Hall of Fame
• USA Curling Hall of Fame
• U.S. Rugby Hall of Fame
• U.S. Squash Hall of Fame
• World Wiffle Ball Championship Hall of Fame.

As someone who has researched halls of fame, it can be difficult to draw the line on which halls to include in a list. If there’s an exhibit of hall of famers within a larger museum, I’ll include it. But I won’t include a hall that just has a physical location for its sponsoring organization. Chances are there’s nothing to see there.
I decided to include college sports halls of fame on my list, but not high school halls of fame. The latter is at best a display case in a school that only students, teachers and parents can visit anyway.
The Sports Fan Project website is edited by lifelong sports fan Doug Hill.

Screw ‘netiquette’! Putting weblinks in blog posts is a waste of effort

This weekend, I wasted several hours removing broken weblinks from my articles on Tech-media-tainment. Most of the dead weblinks were originally to news articles. But now they lead to 404 error pages.
It’s always been good netiquette (internet etiquette) to provide links to articles you are discussing. It gives readers additional context and resources to get more information on a subject.
But after my most recent purge of bad weblinks, I’ve decided to limit when I provide them in the future. I’ll provide enough information for readers to do an internet search but not use hypertext coding. That means citing the publication, headline and date of a story, but not a weblink. Over the years too many weblinks become unusable.
Having too many broken links on a website is bad for the user experience and can negatively affect a website’s search ranking. A high number of broken links signals to search engines that your website is not well-maintained, and it can hinder how search engines crawl and index your pages.
My latest search for broken links using BrokenLinkCheck.com flagged 564 bad weblinks.
Some I couldn’t fix because they involved embedded Twitter/X or Instagram posts. A lot of celebrities appear to have deleted their Twitter accounts, for instance.
However, the link checker probably undercounted the number of useless links because many links I manually deleted had automatically redirected to publisher homepages.
The link rot problem was worse on the older blog pages, which makes sense. I’ve been posting to Tech-media-tainment since November 2008.
In some older posts where I had linked to numerous news articles, I had to delete most of the links because they didn’t work anymore.
In some links that did work, the articles were missing media such as photos, slideshows and video.
Some offenders who broke the weblinks on their end included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization, Creative Commons and the CES trade show.
Repeat offenders among publishers included Bloomberg Businessweek, Entertainment Weekly, Gizmodo, GQ, Mental Floss and The Onion.
Some interesting smaller websites that I had highlighted years ago have been taken over by spam sites or gambling websites. Others just said that their URL was for sale.
I wish the Blogger platform, which Tech-media-tainment uses, would include a built-in broken link checker and a simple way to remove bad weblinks. That sounds like something that artificial intelligence would be great for.
However, as I’ve written previously, Google doesn’t seem interested in investing in Blogger these days.

Related articles:

Online content not safe from deletion (March 4, 2025)

Google has let its Blogger platform wane, but at least it’s still free (March 2, 2025)

Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers (March 1, 2025)

Content on the internet has an expiration date (Feb. 23, 2025)

The internet is awash in broken links (Oct. 1, 2024)

Photo: ERR 404 license plate in Australia. (Photo via Creative Commons from Flickr user Michael Coghlan.)

Google has let its Blogger platform wane, but at least it’s still free

I started Tech-media-tainment on Google’s Blogger platform at the tail end of the blogging craze in late 2008. Blogger offered the best-available free platform for anyone to create a blog on any subject.
I’m still happy with Blogger after all these years, but it clearly is a low priority for Google now. Google hasn’t changed Blogger much in that time, but it has become less functional over that period. I can’t do things on Blogger that I used to be able to, such as edit a post from that post’s published page or place photos within body text just by putting my cursor where I wanted the photo to go (in the "compose view").
But it still does the job I need it to do and it’s still free. I wouldn’t blog if I had to pay to do it.
In fact, Google used to pay me through an ad-sharing arrangement by having AdSense on Tech-media-tainment. Between 2012 and 2016, I received a check whenever my share of ad revenue topped $100. In all, I received five checks.
But after I wrote a few blog posts looking at the public figures that the porn industry liked to parody in their videos, Tech-media-tainment was de-monetized. My blog didn’t feature actual pornography but the subject matter apparently violated the rules for AdSense. So that relationship ended.
Blogging was still cool when I started Tech-media-tainment but it was soon replaced in the zeitgeist as creators moved to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others. Many creators soon became social media influencers.
Back when I started Tech-media-tainment, Blogger used to spotlight interesting blogs on the service. But it ended the Blogs of Note column around 2011.
I’m just happy that Blogger is still operating. It helps to have a wealthy conglomerate like Alphabet backing it. I had previously tried free blogging services GeoCities, Xoom and Soup.io, but they all went out of business. Lots of bloggers moved to WordPress, but that costs money.

Photo: Blogger start page.

Link rot problem: Why bother using weblinks anymore?

In school, we’re taught to “cite your sources.” That’s easy in the internet age through weblinks. But the problem of link rot – weblinks that stop working – has caused a breakdown in the attribution process.
It’s common courtesy (good netiquette) to include weblinks in articles so readers can easily get more information on a subject or to check out the original source of information. But many weblinks go bad over time as companies change content management systems, remove content, or even go out of business.
I’ve seen it firsthand at Tech-media-tainment. Whenever I run a broken link checker like BrokenLinkCheck.com, I find dozens, often hundreds, of broken links to fix on my blog.
It makes me wonder if I should even use weblinks in articles anymore. One reason not to do so is because Google down ranks websites that have a lot of broken links. Nobody wants that. And broken links provide a bad user experience.
One place on Tech-media-tainment where link rot is evident is with the websites that I’ve spotlighted as favorites over the years.
For instance, from August 2009 to November 2017, I spotlighted 300 interesting websites on Tech-media-tainment. Of those, 93 are no longer online. That’s 31% of the websites I spotlighted during that period that are no longer available.
Of the first 100 websites I wrote about, from August 2009 to July 2015, 35% are no longer available.
It just goes to show that content on the internet doesn’t have permanence. What’s here today could be gone tomorrow.

Photo: “Broken Link” tombstone in Woodland Cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa, by Carl Wycoff. (Via Creative Commons)

Most popular posts of 2021: Netflix criticism, live events post-Covid and lying clickbait

Here are the top 10 most-viewed stories on Tech-media-tainment in 2021:

1. Netflix is taking away the ability of subscribers to reorder their streaming lists (Aug. 1, 2021)
2. Erin Burnett a lesbian? Shakira in the Hells Angels? No, just lying clickbait (June 27, 2021)
3. Conference organizers take steps to restart in-person shows after pandemic (July 17, 2021)
4. Newest physical hall of fame is devoted to monster trucks (July 18, 2021)
5. The reopening of the economy can’t come soon enough for E3 (June 19, 2021)
6. Journalists are getting buried by irrelevant news pitches (April 18, 2021)
7. Post-Covid reopening delayed by delta variant (July 16, 2021)
8. Lessons from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 2021 (Aug. 16, 2021)
9. Return of live events post Covid crisis still in question (April 17, 2021)
10. How the conference industry sees the reopening of the economy post-Covid (April 14, 2021)

Photo: Netflix screen on an iPhone. (Netflix)

Most popular posts of 2020: Red-headed hottie identified, presidential porn parody and more

This was a quiet year for Tech-media-tainment. In fact, I posted the fewest articles of any full year since I started blogging more than 12 years ago.
Maybe I’ll ramp things up next year. We’ll see.
What follows are the top 10 most-viewed stories on Tech-media-tainment in 2020:

1. 2020 presidential race gets its first porn parody (May 3, 2020)
2. Meet Iuliia Ciari, the stunning redhead behind a host of online ads (May 17, 2020)
3. Top 20 celebrities predicted to die in 2020 (Jan. 1, 2020)
4. The most controversial U.S. magazine covers of 2019 (Dec. 26, 2019)
5. When clickbait articles tout photos from North Korea, they’re lying (April 12, 2020)
6. CES 2021: Will it happen? And if so, how different will it be? (May 23, 2020)
7. CES 2021 considering Covid-19 screenings for attendees (June 23, 2020)
8. Lying clickbait remains healthy during Covid-19 pandemic (May 25, 2020)
9. Celebrities at CES 2020: Alicia Keys, Shay Mitchell, Terry Crews and more (Jan. 12, 2020)
10. Amazon Prime Video unleashes wave after wave of post-apocalyptic movies (Feb. 16, 2020)

Photo: Russian model Iuliia Ciari.

Most popular posts of 2019: Lying clickbait exposés, dead pools and hot LFL players

For the fourth year in a row, the most popular stories on Tech-media-tainment were those exposing online content promoters using lying clickbait to attract readers.
In addition to lying clickbait, other topics of interest to TMT readers included celebrity dead pools, LFL player pictorials and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame commentary.
What follows are the top 10 most visited stories on Tech-media-tainment in 2019:

1. Bait-and-switch photos in lying clickbait (Jan. 28, 2019)
2. Top 20 celebrities predicted to die in 2019 (Jan. 1, 2019)
3. Fake Monica Lewinsky photos, fake Old West photos, fake North Korea photos (Feb. 3, 2019)
4. The 10 hottest women in the LFL, 2019 edition (Aug. 11, 2019)
5. 2019 psychic predictions for Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and Apple (Jan. 14, 2019)
6. Rock Hall proposal: 20 for ’20 (Sept. 2, 2019)
7. Pat Benatar leads my Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wish list (July 5, 2019)
8. Post-apocalyptic TV shows ready for comeback (Sept. 8, 2019)
9. The 10 hottest women in the LFL in 2019, part 2 (Aug. 11, 2019)
10. 2019 will be big year for plant-based meat, beer-brewing machines and ‘Harry Potter’ mobile game (Jan. 2, 2019)

Blog like nobody’s reading

When I started this blog, Tech-media-tainment, eleven years ago last month, journalists and creative writers were already shifting to other forms of expression online.
People were gravitating toward social media and platforms for short-form writing and multimedia posts of photos and videos. Twitter was just catching on and Tumblr was ramping in popularity. Facebook was a few years old and Instagram was still a couple of years away.
I was late to the blogging game, but I relished the idea of having a platform for expressing myself. I wasn’t going to do a weblog diary about my life like some of my relatives. I decided to approach blogging from a journalistic perspective. I wrote about subjects that interested me and hopefully would interest others.
My first blog post on Nov. 6, 2008, was about how Netflix’s algorithms assumed that I was gay, presumably based on my love of musicals and Marilyn Monroe.
Over the years I’ve written about many subjects in entertainment, pop culture, personal technology and media. I’ve mostly moved on from some subjects, such as the death of print media, public domain and copyright law, and libertarian causes. Most recently I’ve decided to stop reviewing revisionist fairytale artwork.
My enthusiasm for blogging dropped after Google, owner of the Blogger platform, demonetized this blog for having some “adult content” by its broad definition. Apparently, you can’t discuss pornography in a news context without getting flagged by Google.
I intend to continue blogging, but my interest in regular posting has ebbed. I’m on pace for my lowest total posts ever this year.
Still, Tech-media-tainment has racked up more than 2.77 million views to date.

Photo: Blogger T-shirt by Keso. (Via Creative Commons)

The 10 hottest women in the LFL, 2019 edition

Since Google has branded this blog as “adult: sexual content” based on less than 0.5% of its posts, we might as well embrace it. Google’s Blogger platform has an issue with photos of women in bikinis apparently.
So, Tech-media-tainment today will feature its picks for the 10 sexiest players in the LFL women’s football league in 2019. This is the fourth straight year that I’ve attempted this feat.
As Taylor Swift sings on the song “You Need to Calm Down”: “We see you over there on the internet; Comparing all the girls who are killing it.”
Yeah, that’s me. Guilty.
This is no easy job for any red-blooded American man. The Legends Football League is jam-packed with strong, attractive women. Narrowing the list to just a few leaves out a great deal of beautiful, athletic women.
To make the list, the ladies must be active on social media and post a lot of photos. From there, the selection process is purely subjective.

Taylor Boryca

Taylor Boryca is a wide receiver and defensive back with the Omaha Heart. (See also photo at top.)

Ninotchka “Nina” Claud

Ninotchka “Nina” Claud is a wide receiver for the Los Angeles Temptation. She also is a personal trainer at Nvision Fit.

Kandy Cooke

Kandy Cooke is a tight end and linebacker with the Nashville Knights.

Monique Gaxiola

Monique Gaxiola is a center, tight end and linebacker for the L.A. Temptation.

The Lopez sisters

Sisters Marissa and Miriah Lopez play for the L.A. Temptation. Both work in the fitness industry in Los Angeles.

The list continues in part two …

My blog was marginalized, demonetized by Google

In a decade of blogging on Tech-media-tainment, I have posted nearly 1,700 articles spanning pop culture and musings on technology and media.
Blogging platform Blogger, owned by Google, a year or so ago labeled this blog as mature-themed on the basis of eight articles. It restricts advertising via its AdSense service to Tech-media-tainment because those eight articles have what it deems “adult: sexual content.”
A few of those posts talk about pornography, but they don’t contain any porn or nudity. They include an article on how adult movies portray real-life politicians and other public figures. Another features a list of funny Christmas porn movie titles. Yet another has a list of funny porn parody movie titles. (I classify the last two as high-school boy humor.)
Other articles deemed “sexual content” include a post on how lying clickbait was trying to pass off a porn actress as Clinton White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Also, Google considers photos of women in bikinis as “sexual content.” One such article was on actresses who have portrayed Tarzan’s girlfriend Jane in movies. Another was on female athletes in the Legends Football League.
Most of those articles are many years old and aren’t representative of Tech-media-tainment as a whole.
This blog used to generate about $100 a year in ad revenue. But after Google instituted its prudish stance on what it considers “sexual content,” ad revenue dried up.
I suspect that the classification of this blog as having “sexual content” also led Google to remove it from search results.
Basically, Google has demonetized Tech-media-tainment. Critics say Google is doing the same thing with some content creators on its YouTube platform. If those content creators espouse controversial views, they can get their ads shut off.
I could get this blog reinstated in good standing with Google if I removed those eight articles. But I don’t want to do that on principle. I write this blog because I have ideas to share, not to generate ad revenue.
Still, I’d like to get my content seen. So, I might have to reconsider my position and self-censor this blog.

Photo: Blogger shirt (Creative Commons: Keso)

Emily Ratajkowski, lying clickbait stories drive blog traffic in 2018

For the third year in a row, the most popular stories on Tech-media-tainment were those about online content promoters using lying clickbait.
Seven of the top 20 posts last year were about clickbait tactics, including the use of sexy women like the incomparable Emily Ratajkowski. (The hot photos on her Instagram feed have attracted 21.1 million followers.)
Readers also were drawn to posts about controversial magazine covers and year-ahead predictions.
Also, four top posts were related to the adult film industry. Those few posts were enough for Google-owned Blogger to restrict the type of ads shown on Tech-media-tainment. It now classifies the website as having “sexual content” even though I’m just reporting on news and trends.
Here’s a list of the top 20 articles on Tech-media-tainment based on page views for 2018.

1. Fake Old West photos, fake teachers and other lying clickbait (Jan. 25, 2018)
2. Presenting Photoshopped fakes as the real deal: clickbait edition (Jan. 24, 2018)
3. Emily Ratajkowski and other clickbait cuties (Jan. 26, 2018)
4. Fake historical photos, deceptive pictures and other lying clickbait tactics (April 3, 2018)
5. Clickbait exposés dominate most popular posts of 2017 (Dec. 25, 2017)
6. New year, same clickbait tactics (Jan. 23, 2018)
7. The most controversial magazine covers of 2018 (Dec. 22, 2018)
8. Augmented reality: Is there a porn app for that? (July 30, 2018)
9. Top 20 celebrities predicted to die in 2018 (Jan. 1, 2018)
10. Bitcoin boom and bust, Magic Leap glasses flop and other 2018 tech predictions (Dec. 23, 2017)
11. Psychic predictions for 2018 (Dec. 24, 2017)
12. Snubbed by magazines, Melania Trump is embraced by pornographers (Feb. 26, 2018)
13. Post-apocalyptic scenarios explored in X-rated movies (Sept. 3, 2018)
14. The 10 hottest women of the LFL (Aug. 19, 2018)
15. Comprehensive list of post-apocalyptic TV shows (Jan. 21, 2018)
16. Blockchain: Is there a porn app for that? (Jan. 20, 2018)
17. President Trump depicted as crying baby, nutjob, Neanderthal on latest magazine covers (Jan. 19, 2018)
18. Notable nude magazine covers in 2017 (Dec. 17, 2017)
19. Fake news! Lying clickbait exposed! (June 23, 2018)
20. Trump Hair Cotton Candy and other unusual items at the Sweets & Snacks Expo (May 26, 2018)

Photo: Emily Ratajkowski from her Instagram feed.

Tech-media-tainment turns 10

Tech-media-tainment – a blog covering personal technology, media, pop culture and entertainment – marks its 10-year anniversary today.
The blog is still a catchall for my personal interests, which have evolved over the last decade. I hope readers have found the subject matter interesting over the years.
One constant has been my support for freedom of speech and specifically the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The First Amendment has come under attack by political groups who want to narrow its scope by including exceptions for so-called “hate speech” and some forms of political speech. Thankfully the courts have held firm on the broad protections for the First Amendment.
For free speech to survive, we as a people must be willing to accept speech that we disagree with or find offensive. As my favorite T-shirt reads, “Free Speech More Important Than Your Feelings.”
Other major topics of interest for Tech-media-tainment include the importance of the public domain and abuses of copyright.
I’ve also written a lot about halls of fame, Donald Trump magazine covers, revisionist Disney princess art, post-apocalyptic entertainment and the proliferation of lying clickbait.
Unfortunately I’ve cut back on my blogging activity this year as I’ve been busy with other things.
I’m on pace in 2018 to post my lowest full-year article count since I started Tech-media-tainment.
Maybe I should pick up the pace a bit.

Photo: T-shirt from Libertarian Country.

Clickbait exposés dominate most popular posts of 2017

For the second year in a row, the most popular posts on Tech-media-tainment had to do with exposing the deceitful practices of clickbait purveyors.
Among those posts, the favorites were about sexy young women, so I’m probably appealing to the same audience as those original clickbait articles. But at least my readers will get their facts straight.
Here’s a list of the top 20 articles on TMT based on page views for 2017.

1. Lying clickbait: Hot celebrity wives and daughters … not (March 21, 2017)
2. Clickbait cuties: Sexy female athletes (March 28, 2017)
3. Lying clickbait: Close-but-no-cigar edition (Dec. 13, 2016)
4. Clickbait cliche: The crowd got more than it bargained for (Feb. 3, 2017)
5. Lying clickbait: Celebrities paired with hideous photos (March 20, 2017)
6. Clickbait cuties: The sexy sirens of sponsored articles (March 27, 2017)
7. First step to combat fake news: End lying clickbait (Dec. 8, 2017)
8. Lying clickbait: Pretty women as the honeypot (Feb. 12, 2017)
9. Clickbait cliche: Photos that almost broke the internet (March 30, 2017)
10. 2017 psychic predictions: Brad Pitt and Rihanna a couple? (Dec. 31, 2016)
11. Lying clickbait: Fake Woodstock photos, historic images and death reports (Dec. 29, 2016)
12. Lying clickbait: Missed-by-a-mile edition (Dec. 14, 2016)
13. The most controversial foreign magazine covers of 2017 (Dec. 16, 2017)
14. Disney princesses reimagined as Warhammer 40K space marines, wookies and potatoes (March 11, 2017)
15. The sexiest LFL players of 2017 (June 30, 2017)
16. Not Monica Lewinsky photos; they’re lying clickbait (Dec. 26, 2016)
17. Fake North Korea photos: More lying clickbait (Jan. 31, 2017)
18. Clickbait funnies (April 6, 2017)
19. Lying clickbait: Crazy celebrity transformations, geography fails, porn fantasies (May 18, 2017)
20. Lying clickbait: Fake historical photos, fake North Korea photos, fake Titanic photos (March 19, 2017)

Photo: Former UCLA cheerleader and clickbait favorite MaCall Manor.

Lying clickbait exposes and sexy women a hit with readers

Readers of Tech-media-tainment like articles exposing lying clickbait articles and about sexy women. Those types of articles generated the most traffic in 2016.
Here’s a list of the top 25 articles on TMT based on page views for 2016.

1. The rise of lying click-bait photos with promoted articles (May 16, 2016)
2. Sexy depictions of Belle from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (Feb. 11, 2016)
3. Live nude girls! Top 20 naked celebrity magazine covers of 2015 (Jan. 17, 2016)
4. More lying click-bait articles (June 5, 2016)
5. Actresses who have played Jane, Tarzan’s girlfriend (July 2, 2016)
6. The sexiest LFL players of 2016, U.S. league (July 5, 2016)
7. The sexiest LFL players of 2016, part 2 (July 5, 2016)
8. Sexy Alice in Wonderland illustrations (May 30, 2016)
9. Mexico loves bikini football (Feb. 7, 2016)
10. Lying click-bait articles: transgender celebrities and what actors look like today (June 22, 2016)
11. Psychic predictions for 2016: celebrity breakups, babies and deaths (Jan. 2, 2016)
12. 13 actresses who have played Belle in Beauty and the Beast and 1 more who will (Feb. 10, 2016)
13. Lying click-bait articles with inaccurate photos (Aug. 13, 2016)
14. CES 2016 booth babes in review (Jan. 9, 2016)
15. Larry Flynt’s Hustler sticks it to the Republican Party with new porn parody (Jan. 31, 2016)
16. CES 2016 light on celebrities; most star power found at private events (Jan. 10, 2016)
17. Disney princesses as Jedi knights, Zodiac signs and hot dogs (Feb. 13, 2016)
18. The 20 most controversial magazine covers of 2015 (Jan. 18, 2016)
19. Yahoo Finance redesign getting terrible reviews, called ‘New Coke of the Internet’ (July 17, 2016)
20. Is there a porn app for that? (Jan. 30, 2016)
21. A record 12 post-apocalyptic TV series currently airing (Jan. 27, 2016)
22. Sexy women, revisionist fairy tales, fun lists keep readers coming back (Jan. 1, 2016)
23. Britney Spears at the Axis Theater: A slick Las Vegas production (Jan. 16, 2016)
24. Donald Trump takes a commanding lead … in porn parodies (June 26, 2016)
25. The 20 most significant magazine covers of 2015 (Jan. 20, 2016)

Photo: Sample Arsenic Magazine photo.

Websites with an expiration date

Creativity is rampant on the internet. People are always coming up with new ideas for funny memes or collections of photos and other things.
But these websites usually have an expiration date. The joke runs its course or the curator loses interest in the subject.
What happens then is the website either disappears (if someone has to pay web hosting fees) or it becomes a zombie blog that is no longer updated (if it’s on a free blogging platform like Blogger and Tumblr).
Of the 275 websites I’ve highlighted as favorites on Tech-media-tainment, 34 are dead, with the content no longer accessible, and at least 64 are zombie blogs.
That works out to 23% of the blogs I’ve spotlighted are no longer being updated but the content is still available. In many cases, the content hasn’t been refreshed or added to in years. But at least the content is still available (for now) as a time capsule of what was once of interest.
I’ve started and abandoned a couple of online works, so I can relate. (See: One Stop Video and TSA Rants.)
Among the blogs that I previously spotlighted that are now zombie blogs are: The Brokers with Hands on Their Faces Blog, Con Artist Hall of Infamy, Evolution of Soft Drink Cans, Hot Olympic Girls, My Kid Is Gifted, Rappers Doing Normal Shit, What Ridiculous Food Day Is Your Birthday? and, of course, Zombie Dead Blog.
Another example is a website I meant to spotlight, but it only lasted a couple of days.
In July, Jason Shevrin, a media relations person at George Washington University, created a Tumblr blog called Empty Pressers. It featured photos journalists posted on Twitter of empty podiums ahead of press conferences by government officials.
The blog was active for just two days and posted just seven entries.

Photo: Socks the cat from Empty Pressers. 

Link rot, a problem with no end in sight

Every year I run a scan of Tech-media-tainment to check for broken weblinks and each year I’m saddened by how many I find.
I like to include weblinks to news articles, blog posts and websites to provide additional resources for readers. But as the years pass, a lot of those links stop working. People clicking on those hyperlinks will get 404 and other error messages.
That’s frustrating for readers. And it’s frustrating for blog editors like me. I spend a few hours every year deleting dead links, a problem known as link rot.
Link rot makes it difficult to preserve information and research online. What’s here today might not be here tomorrow. It is the biggest failed promise of digital content.
Once again I used the free online tool at BrokenLinkCheck.com to scan for web pages with broken or dead links. The tool processed 1,513 web pages at Tech-media-tainment and found 161 broken links.
Quite a few websites simply went kaput, including specialty sites and viral media aggregators on Tumblr and elsewhere.
Among the websites that shut down were those for older movies and canceled TV shows, including “Katy Perry: Part of Me,” “Terminator: Salvation” and NBC’s “Do No Harm.”
Defunct businesses that let their websites expire included the Bikini Hockey League and Lingerie Basketball League.
Another website that closed was for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. That website, Recovery.gov, was President Barack Obama’s plan to get the U.S. out of the Great Recession. I guess his administration said “Mission accomplished” and shut it down.
At least 16 of the bad links belonged to the Huffington Post. In many cases, HuffPo had run an Associated Press story, but the licensing rights likely expired.
News websites especially need to be better stewards of online content and keep weblinks from expiring. There needs to be more permanence to online content.

Photo: Huffington Post 404 error page.

Where did all the interesting websites go?

Google’s Blogger used to spotlight interesting blogs on its platform with a feature called Blogs of Note. But it quit that feature in 2012.
The Huffington Post used to have a weekly article titled “7 Sites You Should Be Wasting Time on Right Now.” But it ended that feature in June 2014.
Internet users have shifted from blogs to social media to share fun and interesting ideas and media. Lovingly curated blogs devoted to a single topic have given way to quick hit funnies and notes on Reddit, Twitter and elsewhere online.
In the seven years I’ve been writing Tech-media-tainment, I’ve spotlighted over 250 cool websites. But lately they’ve become fewer and far between.
Early on there were a lot of Blogger blogs highlighted on TMT. Then Tumblr was a popular place to create blogs (before it became a heavy-handed DMCA tool and a vast wasteland for TV show GIFs, lame quotes and cat photos).
Now it’s hard for me to find interesting websites, especially those devoted to pop culture and Internet curation.
It’s been almost a year since I last posted a collection of 25 interesting blogs.
What follows are a few interesting websites that I’ve been meaning to spotlight.

The Meta Picture

The Meta Picture is an old-fashioned photo blog with funny memes, comics and inspirational messages.
The quality is hit-and-miss, but the blog posts a lot of material. It’s worth checking out for grins every now and then.
See sample photos above.

Perv_magnet

Professional violinist Mia Matsumiya created an Instagram account, Perv_magnet, to document all the rude come-ons and misogynistic comments she gets online.
Matsumiya describes herself as a “perv magnet.”
“I’ve archived 1,000+ messages from creeps, weirdos and fetishists over the past 10 years,” she says in her bio. “I’ve decided to post them all.”
(See article by the Huffington Post.)

Couple Pictures 2015

Last fall, Nicole Larson of Alberta, Canada, made a lot of people chuckle by posting a parody engagement photo album on Facebook.
She posed with a Pizza Hut box in a series of outdoor photos for a collection called Couple Pictures 2015.
“I wanted to do a spoof of other couples pictures because I am single and in my opinion pizza never lets you down,” Larson told the Huffington Post.

FatCatArt

Russian artist Svetlana Petrova likes to add her large ginger tabby into classic works of art. She posts the works on her website FatCatArt.
She has since branched out into FatCatArt calendars and a book.
(See article by the Daily Mail.)

Chipmunkson16speed

Toronto-based electronic musician Brian Borcherdt took some old Chipmunks records and rerecorded them on a suitcase record player at 16 RPM.
The result, a SoundCloud account called Chipmunkson16speed, is “both brilliant and terrifying,” the A.V. Club said. The chirpy pop records now sound like dirge metal tracks. My favorite is the cover of Blondie’s “Call Me.”