Those of you who read this blog as Notes on Facebook, please be aware that this will be the last post you will see that way. The reason for this is explained here. Briefly Facebook is planning to sell content that people write on their site to be used in ads. So, for example, if I wrote about a book here Facebook might sell what I wrote to the publisher who could then create an ad making it look like what I wrote was a paid endorsement. (And yes, Facebook does claim ownership of everything you post on their site, even if it is imported from elsewhere with a copyright notice on it.)

Of course publishers use blubs from reviews all the time, but it is generally obvious when they do so and no money changes hands. Given Facebook’s past behavior I don’t trust them in the slightest, and I’m not fond of the idea of giving them free ad revenue. There are plenty of other ways you can follow my blog, the most obvious being Twitter (which requires companies to ask permission before they can use your work in “promoted tweets”).

Update: Facebook has always been a bit patchy about which posts of mine it imports. I’d always put that down to incompetence rather than censorship. But I see they failed to import this post. I have now turned the import off. What’s the better that they continue to import anyway?