Industry News

I recently did a first draft of my manager README and I end it with some books and newsletter that have shaped my thinking, and continue to do so. I thought it might be useful to a broader audience so I’m sharing it here as well. These are the books I keep right next to my desk, and the newsletters I open every time they arrive in my inbox. Books that have shaped my thinking Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting for by Jonathan Raymond The Coaching Habit: Say Less,...

For anyone else following along on “The Death of Media”… There are plenty of dire stories about layoffs and newsrooms shutting down, so I like finding stories of innovation (or small steps) in the space that appear to be working. I think 404 Media is doing great work, and their latest addition of a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers makes me very happy:

Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed,...

Some really interesting (and surprising) takeaways in this research, and a very good analysis by Caitlin Dewey in Actually, the internet’s always been this bad:

A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more ‘toxic’ today than it was in the early 1990s. […] Overall, the study found that the prevalence of both toxic speech and highly toxic users were extremely low. But the longer any conversation...

Cal Newport writes about some recent research on the impact of social media followers/traffic in Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? The tl;dr is that audience != impact:

In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement....

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google Web Stories do show up in Google Image search, Google posted a correction...

This week we covered that Google is now testing SGE in the wild for a small subset of US users. Google is begging SEOs to stop doing SEO for Google...

Google Ads has not posted a new feature announcement in its new features & announcements help document in all of March 2024 (I know March is not over yet, but it almost is).

In February, Google told us that they stopped showing Web Stories in Google Image search results. Well, last night, Google issued a correction saying Google has been showing Web Stories in Google Images but the Web Stories icon does not show. To make things worse, Search Console had a bug where it was not reporting these impressions or clicks.

Google seems to have added a new feature to allow businesses to add an amenity or amenities from their Google Business Profiles to their website. The new card when you search for [my business] says, "Add amenity map to your website, show nearby amenities to help customers explore your area."

You can now see Microsoft Copilot, formerly Bing Chat, referrer data in your Google Analytics reports. Himanshu Sharma posted about this on X yesterday, he said, "Copilot has started sending referrer data to GA4."