Industry News

December was a pretty quiet month, like usual. Google tends to be shy when pushing out updates, but we did see several potential updates which are linked to below. Google did not go forward with Penguin 4.0 and should be pushing it this coming month...

I’m pretty unsentimental about things like birthdays and new years, but I’m also only human and sometimes things sneak up on you unexpectedly. Earlier this week I was standing in our kitchen, staring into space as I waited for the water to boil, and suddenly my eyes focused on this—a series of guidelines my wife wrote down for our 6-year old daughter during the course of a particular trying day with her:



I looked at it, and then I saw it, and then I read it. And then I read it. And...

Jon Kolko wrote a wonderful personal essay called Look, I Made a Thing: Confidence in Making:

If you stick with it, through the years of shitty ashtrays and embarrassing critiques and rejections, you start to learn that making things is powerful, mostly because on the way to making things, you build confidence. You can take on problems that are out of your league. You can become a teacher with no teaching experience. You can make money and provide value. You can lead a conversation,...

The New Year has brought a fresh look for our Search Marketing Expo conference, with a new logo, website and tagline. Here’s a guide to all the changes we’re excited about. Obsessed With SEO & SEM

Search Marketing Expo — SMX — is the search marketing conference that Search Engine Land has produced since 2007. SMX is unique because it’s the only major conference series that’s entirely focused on search.

We love the breadth of digital marketing. That’s why we operate our Marketing Land...

We know Google decided to halt the release of Penguin 4.0 until after the holidays. We also know that Google is confident Penguin is good to be released this month...

From Will Oremus’s insightful story How Facebook’s news feed algorithm works:

Facebook’s data scientists were aware that a small proportion of users—5 percent—were doing 85 percent of the hiding. When Facebook dug deeper, it found that a small subset of those 5 percent were hiding almost every story they saw—even ones they had liked and commented on. For these “superhiders,” it turned out, hiding a story didn’t mean they disliked it; it was simply their way of marking the post “read,”...

Historical recording Aboriginal Corroboree, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Some rights reserved

Advertising on the Web is going through some changes because of how smart phones and tablets track visitors on a site, and how...

It’s interesting to see the web vs apps pendulum swing back to the web in recent months. From Larry Seltzer’s Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete?:

What’s the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser. Updates to HTML apps happen entirely on the server, so users get them immediately. There’s no window of vulnerability between the release of a security fix and the user applying...

For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies.

― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

The Mechanical wasn’t on my radar until a friend recommended it, but it jumped to the top of my reading queue as soon as I read the blurb. I’m not usually a fan of alternate...