Industry News

Courtney Martin’s essay on The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems really got to me. She makes the case that instead of traveling all over the world to solve social problems in other countries, we should focus on the problems at home:

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems is dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve avoided. While thousands of the country’s best and brightest flock to far-flung places to ease unfamiliar suffering and tackle foreign...

I was lucky enough to see Sha Hwang‘s brilliant closing keynote at UX Burlington 2015 about his work on Healthcare.gov. So I was excited to see that Sha just posted a recent talk he did called Digital Materiality, a short reflection on gifs and gif culture:

gifs are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are  important: they do not belong to anyone. because of their constraints they become a design material, to be played with, challenged, and explored....

The Google Dance is back.

Don’t know what the Google Dance is? Sure, it’s the nickname given to when Google’s search results dance around after an algorithm update. But it’s also the name of an annual gathering for search marketers that Google hosted at its Googleplex headquarters from 2002 through 2008.

Now the Google Dance is back. It’s happening again in conjunction with our SMX West search marketing conference that runs through March 1 to March 3 in San Jose. The History Of The...

Back in my eBay days, when Net Promoter was just becoming a huge deal, there came a time when we were asked to include the measurement in our user research. Even then I was extremely uncomfortable with the simplistic nature of the measure, but I just didn’t have the experience to speak up about it. It seems that NPS is finally getting the wind taken out of its sails. The latest takedown I read is Matt LeMay’s excellent On Net Promoter and Data Golems:

This very ubiquity is a huge part...

Leigh Alexander wrote a very interesting essay on how Facebook is getting a little… “intimate” with its users lately. She extrapolates that to a growing trend in The New Intimacy Economy:

Pretending at closeness is really the only way forward for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. As such, watch as organizations pretend, with increasing intensity, that they are individuals. Start counting how many times platforms, services and websites entreat you in human voices, with...

Neil Cybart has a very interesting analysis of AAPL, the stock, and Apple, the company. From The Two Apples:

While AAPL investors look at changing revenue sources and Apple entering new industries as risk factors, for Apple such characteristics are normal business and according to plan. It is this divide that will likely continue indefinitely, suggesting it is unwise to expect AAPL to one day begin to follow Apple. Just as a declining AAPL stock price is no indication of a struggling...

If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.

—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear.

Honestly, I am surprised Google did it (we know they had to, but I am surprised it happened), Google's Panda algorithm is now part of the core ranking algorithm...

On Friday we covered many people starting to see ranking changes in Google and then again, over the weekend we said this was a massive update but I said it didn't seem likely it was Penguin...

It’s been roughly 15 years since I made an entity–relationship model, so it is with great surprise that I sat in a meeting the other day and thought to myself “This project needs an ER model before we can do anything else.” I almost asked out loud, “WHO SAID THAT!?” But once I got over the initial shock I realized that my subconscious isn’t completely full of crap (this time).

But let’s back up. I’m working on a project to combine a variety of different back-end services into a single...