Industry News

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...

When someone searches the web, and asks a question such as “what is the capital of Poland” or “what is the birth date of George Washington” a web search engine such as Google may not be very helpful in providing an answer if it provides a list of...

In March 2011, Matt Cutts of Google told us Google does indeed have exception lists or what you call whitelists, but a week or so before that...

There is no doubt in the vast majority of SEOs and Webmaster's mind that there was indeed a search algorithm change last week with Google. Google wouldn't confirm it but did tell us it was not related to Panda or Penguin...

Google’s Search Suggest is a wonderous feature. Not only does it save humans beings around the planet millions of key entries each day, it’s also a phenomenal keyword research tool for marketers. For reasons that likely center around its commercial intent bias, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool often doesn’t show large swaths of data around keywords, e.g.: If you take the AdWords Keyword Planner on faith, you’d believe that there are no keyword searches with any volume that contain the words...

Kevin Roose and Pendarvis Harshaw wrote a fascinating 3-part series for Fusion on technology in prisons. I was particularly drawn to the part about allowing inmates to use tablets: Can technology and prisons get along? —

He can’t just hand out iPads, of course. The tablets being used in the Napa jail are manufactured by a Chicago start-up called Jail Education Solutions, which runs them on a secure, proprietary software platform called Edovo. The tablets can’t be used to connect to...

I’m as fascinated with Slack‘s rise to prominence as most people, so I really enjoyed From 0 to $1B – Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy (no byline). It’s full of fantastic product strategy advice, including on the importance of user feedback:

As much information as Slack put out to customers, they learned even more themselves. Butterfield and his cofounders are voracious readers of user feedback, and they attribute much of the company’s rapid traction to this skill....