The archive
Notes
Where things are heading, and what to do about it on Monday.
- Taste is the last thing you can't downloadWhen anything can be generated in seconds, the scarce input is judgement. It isn't a gift. It's a compressed record of having been wrong before.
- Most small businesses that get hacked would have failed a 30-minute checkMFA, old logins, your domain, backups and invoice fraud, in the order they cost Australian owners money, each with the bad answer named.
- Average is dead. It's now free.Generative models made competent work cost close to nothing. The floor rose and the middle collapsed. What survives is what a model can't infer.
- Miller was wrong. It's four, not seven.The 7±2 rule everyone quotes was never a design rule, and the working figure is about 4. What that changes about menus, forms, pricing and decks.
- You don't have a content problem. You have a nothing-to-say problem.Posting more is what a business does before it decides what it thinks. The test: could anyone in your industry reasonably disagree with it?
- Agency retainers are being unbundledStrategy, production and access used to share one monthly invoice. Production just got cheap. What to stop paying for and what's worth keeping.
- AI won't cite boring contentAn assistant names a source only when it can't answer without one. Schema, FAQ blocks and llms.txt don't change that. A number nobody else has does.
- You don't need to read code to know if you're being overchargedWho owns it, what changed and when, what the hours bought and what isn't labour. 6 questions to send by email, and what good and bad answers sound like.
- Code got cheap. The work around it didn't.AI cut the price of writing software. Review, security and maintenance are another matter. Which line items on your next quote should drop.
- Automation fails at the handover, not the buildMaking it work is the cheap, enjoyable part. It dies when nobody owns it, nobody can read it and it keeps reporting success while doing nothing.
- Any quote written before these 6 questions is a guessWho signs it off, what doing nothing costs and what the deadline is tied to. The answers that should stop any supplier pricing your work.
- Search traffic is falling and conversions aren't. Read that carefully.AI answers are stripping out the visitors who were never going to buy. Unless you sell attention, that's a cheaper audience, not a smaller one.
- The 30-minute SEO check I run before a full auditSeven things I look at before I'll give an opinion on a site's search, in order and on a time budget. A first pass, not the whole job. Every tool is free.
Nothing matches that.
Either the filters are too narrow or I haven't written it yet. Both are fixable.
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