Industry News

Kashmir Hill asks an interesting question: Who do we blame when a robot threatens to kill people?

Last week, police showed up at the home of Amsterdam Web developer Jeffry van der Goot because a Twitter account under van der Goot’s control had tweeted, according to the Guardian, “I seriously want to kill people.” But the menacing tweet wasn’t written by van der Goot; it was written by a robot.

He goes on:

Bots will be bots. They won’t know if they’re doing something wrong...

It seems like Webmasters and SEOs are getting restless again, this time with the Panda update or lack there of.

The last time webmasters had an official Google Panda update was on September 25, 2014, Google Panda 4.1...

Another possible origin is the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings.

— Eating your own dog food on Wikipedia

In software circles dogfooding is usually encouraged — and for good reason. When companies force themselves to use their own products extensively it can have some great benefits. Since internal users visit even the darkest, most neglected corners of a product, bugs tend to be found and fixed much faster than...

Jon Ronson looks into online shaming (and the lives it destroys) in a brilliant piece of journalism called How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life:

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever...

In a Google+ live hangout with Google's John Mueller on last Friday morning, John answered the question, "is link building in anyway way good...

Google's John Mueller said in a Google+ webmaster live hangout this morning that having duplicate title tags and meta descriptions would not lead to a search quality issue specifically around the Panda algorithm...

In Don’t Say ‘Cyclists,’ Say ‘People on Bikes’ Sarah Goodyear explains how some deliberate language changes turned a serious conflict in Seattle into a civil debate. Here’s what they did:

“Though the group made no secret of their biking advocacy, they didn’t brand themselves as biking advocates,” writes [PeopleForBikes blogger Michael Andersen]. “They branded themselves as neighborhood advocates.”

[Seattle Neighborhood Greenways] also developed a list of new ways to talk about...

Paul Ford wrote a great post about the significance of the blue/green bubbles in the Messages app on iOS. From It’s Kind of Cheesy Being Green:

This spontaneous anti-green-bubble brigade is an interesting example of how sometimes very subtle product decisions in technology influence the way culture works. Apple uses a soothing, on-brand blue for messages in its own texting platform, and a green akin to that of the Android robot logo for people texting from outside its ecosystem. […]...

As we covered, Google promised to test a new alpha version of the search queries report and that has now been released to the first set of alpha/beta testers this morning.
Google said this new report will be changing drastically over the testing period but I wanted to show you the reporting features...