Restarted news service... 🌍

It's been a long time since this site carried regular news items, (8 years of no updates, and only 5 updates in the previous 5 years!) but a lot has been happening, and as I get back into a position where I update the site more regularly, I'm going to try and include news in those updates.

The Internet has moved on a lot in those 13 years - traditional news outlets are very much in decline, and people now get much of their news via social media, and what "the algorithm" serves up to them. In reviewing past news items here, I see that many of them announced new internet resources, that gave me scope to improve how I searched for information about mills - and it's depressing how few of those have stood the test of time, even from government backed entities that should know better than to abandon information that they previously made available. Almost noone has grasped the idea that URLs should be permalinks - if you make information available via a URL (and publicise that URL) then it really is expected that that information remains accessible in the future. (As an aside, thank goodness for the Internet Archive).

News is also suffering from the rise of AI - journalists have never been particularly good at checking their information before they publish, and AI hallucinations take this mis-information to new levels. I shall try hard to avoid reposting AI slop as news.

There are likely to be a flurry of posts in quick succession, as I mine the backlog of things that have caught my eye in the recent past.