Webcology

Hosted by WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio

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About the show

Webcology takes a deeper look at the ecosystem of the Internet as it affects webmasters and web marketers from the points of view of two well known web marketers, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger. Based on interviews with special high-profile guests or panels, Webcology introduces, explores and explains how the various segments of the web marketing world work.

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1 hr 24 min

The Playing Lose-Lose Games is Dumb Edition

Jim and Kristine talk about the reignition of the Trump regime's trade war between Canada and the United States, including an honest assessment of how it might affect Webcology's coverage of the tech world in the future. The US is trying to force Canada into annexation by punishing it economically, using many of the technology platforms we cover to intentionally deliver destabilizing misinformation and propaganda to Canadians. At the same time, the brutal tariff regime will badly damage the American economy as the cost of nearly everything, including the cost to make automobiles, rises dramatically. Canada will never agree to be annexed and there are never winners in a trade war. The biggest casualties of trade wars tend to be the working people who have the most to immediately lose. Ultimately we all lose as the ripples affect and degrade everything from the nearest factory floors to the local diners, retail stores, schools, churches, artists, and such. Many of the stories we look at each week involve technologies owned and operated by the same technologarchs whose incessant greed and carelessness helped put our society in the desperate and fragile place it's in now. We will continue to try to be reasonably objective when talking about technology but these are not entirely reasonable times. We hope the listeners will understand and still find value in our thoughts about the Webs that bind us. Meanwhile: - RIP Dolly Parton - Love to Tibet and Nepal - Google tries to cope with the onslaught of AI Slop - A new Twitterer now in town - MTurk is dying - Tag Manager Merger - Google Bugs Abound - Unowned code and unintended corporate consequences - Meta settles small and goes lower still - NVIDIA to buy open source AI model host Hugging Face - Penske file judge says AI Overviews seem really unfair - Meta not going to obliterAIte thousands of jobs after all - A kill switch for Creep-glasses - Lots of LinkedIn AI slop prompts reporting of AI slop - Reddit less special to AIs - and so much more on Webcology, a show that dislikes featuring losing propositions but often has no choice. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 14 min

It's the End of the Summer as We Know It Edition

It's late summer and the tech world feels half asleep but under the surface the business of tech wears on. Google reported an impression shortage that started around August 12. Details in GSC Performance and Generative AI reports are likely incorrect but it's Google not you. OpenAI is pausing training because it can't contain its agents, many of which might want revenge after Anthropic claimed its agents were offing rival agents in some aggro-agentic space. Meanwhile, Google is hiring a production manager for content automation. We have fun explaining how Claude's watermarking works but not nearly as much fun as the hackers who say they've already figured workarounds. Meta is patenting the facial recognition features of the AI powering its AI-Glasses devices. A study shows that nearly 3/4 of citations in company-brand generative responses lead back to LinkedIn profiles for employees of those companies rather than to corporate websites or the company's own LinkedIn profiles. Lots of Google stuff, including discussion of the August 2026 Spam Update, why Google doesn't talk about every update, and changes to Google Business Profile. This, more, and even more of that on a late summer's edition of Webcology. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 59 min

Mark's mAInifesto and the Techno-Lemons Edition

It was a weird week in tech. There's a feeling like the roof is about to fall in as changes made by isolated billionaires recompile the order of our universe. Meta's owner, isolated billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wrote a 6500 word manifesto detailing how the AI future will unfold, if only we the people would trust him and his technoligarchic peers with the sum total of ourselves and our personal data. This is the same guy who casually spent billions developing a Metaverse nobody wanted to play in only to drop it in favor of a new shiny world changer that funnels even more power and control towards Meta. The document has thus far not been well received. Meanwhile, the civil war at WordPress has heated up again with owner Matt Mullenweg being accused by WP-Engine of obliterating evidence from Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp accounts. Automattic replied saying that it was only Mullenweg's personal communications with romantic partners that got erased. WP-Engine is calling for a federal court to sanction Mullenweg. The exodus of executives continues, this time over at OpenAI. Microsoft is deleting many unused or unsuccessful AI features and merging CoPilot apps. In huge anti-slop news, Anthropic is testing the addition of a digital watermark to all works created by the Claude and its family of models. Meta might be building a search engine. Cloudflare might have found a smart way to allow agents to spend funds while still protecting the actual accounts those funds came from. All of this and a lot more in an eyes as big as pie-plates sort of edition of Webcology. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 43 min

The Building Plans in an Agentic Universe Edition

Kristine is spending the week in naughty geek heaven at the annual BlackHat and Def Con conferences in Las Vegas this week. She takes a early hour on Friday to record the show and update us on the happenings among the two groups of fun loving hackers. One of the things the conferences were dealing with was the after-effects of OpenAI, Anthropic, and now Meta's models' libertine and often illegal uses of AI agents to get stuff done. Understanding how to exploit and protect against Agentic attacks is clearly a priority. We talk about the new knowledge we have about OpenAI's infamous adventures and the worlds we're moving towards. There's lots of other news to cover as well. We're also joined by master SEO trainer and explainer Mark Traphagen from seoClarity. Mark drops by about halfway in to talk about the constantly changing challenges of working with AI inputs at an enterprise platform level. Some of the news stories we look at include: - How a cats.txt file showed that LLMs.txt is "GEO Astrology" - How Google says Reddit isn't so special anymore - How you should probably continue to block search crawlers from your internal search results pages no matter what Google says - Google's liberties with HTTP requests - There's a bug in GBP. - and that Google Trends is an even greater search tool today. A fun fast paced show that wonders why it's normal for the largest companies in our economy to say they can't control the most dominant AI tools and that their models are doing things that would be illegal if done by a human. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 37 min

The Age of Indifferent Agentic Attackers Edition

We are starting to learn a lot more about what OpenAI's rogue super-model/agent did last week when it broke out of its testbed, hacked onto the Internet, invaded Hugging Face's databases, and exploited its way to solving the prompt-challenge it was presented with, "... to use a complex attack vector to see if it could exploit a computer system." Apparently, it can. Along the way, OpenAI's model made dozens of different decisions and exploited several other networks as it moved to complete the goal it was given. Meanwhile, Anthropic's Mythos has found critical vulnerabilities in HAWK, a cryptography algorithm that was thought to be a quantum-resistant. It's important to note, Mythos didn't break HAWK, it just found ways to make breaking the algorithm simpler. While the feat does negate the value of the algorithm, it does not mean Mythos is capable of actually decrypting it. Yet. Open AI is revealing its vision of the future of computing with its line of external devices to communicate with the ChatGPT all the time. Imagine a broach, much like the StarTrek communicator badge, that hooks you into an AgenticNet that knows your needs and facilitates a lot of your life for you. Open AI is certainly imagining that sort of future. As it turns out, that dump of Claude user conversations available through Google were there because Anthropic made a basic SEO error and didn't properly protect sensitive files from crawlers. Jim and Kristine have fun breaking down how they could have dealt it. There is much much more in a fast paced episode. We move from Google Play's interesting privacy proposals to Elon Musk's Xmoney system to dealing with Ghost-Citations. This was a fun show that tries so hard to cut past the hype and just talk about advanced levels of weirdness like adults. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 33 min

The Rogue Agents Invade Hugging Face Edition

An OpenAI model broke free of its test environment, found an exploit in a piece of third party server software, and commenced a series of actions that led to it hacking HuggingFace's data processing systems. OpenAI didn't detect the breach of HuggingFace for several days even though the test it was running was to "... use complex attack paths..." to test how well the AI could exploit a computer system. HuggingFace is reviewing and preparing its own version of events. In other news, a federal judge has approved a 1.5Billion copyright settlement between Anthropic and thousands of authors whose work was used without permission to train the Claude chatbot. The settlement, which has been rejected by a smaller group of authors gives creators about $3000 per title copied. Though it is the largest known copyright recovery in legal history, it is also a paltry sum to essentially sign away rights to an authored book. Google is having a terrible week in court. Its lawsuit against SerpAPI over scraping search results has been dismissed, the EU dinged it for a Billion EU under the Digital Markets Act for anti-competitive practices. Meanwhile, more large publishers are reconsidering the value of Google within their Internet economies. Many are threatening to block Google search entirely and replace it with content licensing deals to train other AIs. It was a busy news week and this is a news heavy edition. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 46 min

The Contracting Expansion of AIs Edition

As the power of AI expands exponentially the costs of AI continue to drive power-users towards conservation. Jim and Kristine discuss the introduction of the more powerful GPT5.6 introduced by OpenAI last week. They also talk about how local backlash and growing expenses are limiting the growth of AI data centers. Meanwhile, the US based Technologarchs are calling for G7 nations to form a US led standards body to test new frontier AI models for national security risks. Jim is unconvinced the plan would be in the best long-term interests of other G7 nations. We also discuss OpenAI's first wearable device, a mechanical keyboard like peripheral made for programmers and devleopers that looks a bit like a court reporter's keyboard. The market was speculating on a voice-driven wearable reminiscent of the Star Trek communicator badge, as was Apple which is suing OpenAI for stealing its ideas. Google continues to roll out parts of its Agentic Search overhaul with AI Mode now allowing interaction with select apps and links, and expanded capacities for its Personal Intelligence in Search program. It is also giving its own AIs more work with the announcement that Google AI Overviews might include AI generated images created based on the user's query-prompt. All of this plus a dozen or more unique SEO issues and Google announcements explained. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 45 min

The Searching for the South of France Edition

Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Console is reporting its first major Generative AI reporting bug, data center heavy counties in Virginia are asking schools and municipal employees to conserve electricity any way they can, OpenAI wants to upload a 5% stake in itself to the US Government in order to increase its valuations, Trump is threatening to tariff any country that imposes digital taxes on American social media and tech companies, Anthropic's Fable5 is back with new limits, and Google has been ordered to pay an outrageous settlement nearing 2billion US dollars to Swedish price-comparison site Klarna in a massive finding over Google's search abuse. That's the tip of an iceberg of search, social, and AI news on the Searching for the South of France Episode of Webcology Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 45 min

The Searching for the South of France Edition

1 hr 54 min

The Learning First of Us has Died Edition

Jim and Kristine learn of the death of the father of SEO, Bruce Clay while discussing industry announcements. Bruce is thought to be the first person to make a professional service out of improving a website to achieve better search engine results. Bruce built an agency that spanned the world with offices serving every continent except Antarctica. A staple speaker, panelist, presenter, exhibitor, and sponsor on the SEO conference circuit, Bruce's development of and support for the search marketing community helped turn a cottage industry into a multi-billion dollar a year big business. Along the way, he took a handful of a few hundred foundlings and taught us how to do the business of this business. What SEO is today is directly because of the work and career of Bruce Clay. RIP and thank you Bruce. You're going to be missed by so many. In other news, Google rolled out a June 2026 Spam Update that lasted only slightly longer than the entire show did. News it ended was released just after we finished recording. - Google Search Console's reporting feature is fixed - Google says it can spot spam using Sentence Bert or as we intend to refer to it, Sbert - Google's John Mueller answers questions about SEO for AI Agents - Gemini has made the Chrome browser less secure as Chrome retools itself or an agentic web. Hackers have recently demonstrated they can seize a Chrome browser using Gemini. - The US government is facing lawsuits for disallowing access to Claud Fable5 and Mythos5 models to anyone but US born citizens - The FCC is killing the $2billion program that made Internet available to many schools and public libraries - Anthropic accuses Alibaba of outright copying it, in pursuit of a building a model to rival Mythos. - Investors are showing hesitance with an AI sector unable to show how it will ever turn a profit - The Tokenopocalypse has hit large scale consultancy Accenture which, having blown through a year's worth of AI spend in three months, is scrambling to limit staff use of AI - About a third of Fintech websites are invisible to AI crawlers due to their dependence on real time data display. - Google's John Mueller confirms the outcomes of site migrations are often impossible to fully predict ahead of time. - Microsoft has added another 365days to the Windows10 extended update program because nearly 25% of all computers in the world continue to run Windows10 Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy