Industry News

In the midst of the recent brouhaha about Markdown1, Craig Mod posted an interesting tweet about the nature of software. In response to John Gruber’s assertion that the original version of Markdown doesn’t need a significant amount of work, he said this:

@gruber @waxpancake I think your point about it being ok for software to be "done" is very strong. We need more "done" software.— Craig Mod (@craigmod) September 5, 2014

This gave me pause, because it flies in the face of a very...

This essay originally appeared in the 8/1/2014 issue of The Loop magazine. It’s a publication worth paying for, and it’s run by Jim Dalrymple, a gentleman with a fantastic beard and an even better laugh. Thank you, sir, for giving me an opportunity to write for The Loop!

1.

My favorite story about coffee is from the year 1600, when Pope Clement VIII was the head of the Catholic Church. As the story goes, the Pope’s advisers urged him to make coffee a forbidden drink for Christians. They...

Google’s new sitelinks search box threatens to take your hard won branded traffic and hand it over to competitors unless you implement the specified markup.

Here’s what’s happening and why you need to bump the sitelinks search box markup implementation to the top of your priorities. Sitelinks Search Box



On September 5th Google announced the launch of an improved search box in sitelinks for branded queries.

When users search for a company by name—for example, [Megadodo Publications]...

As I’m sure you’re extremely tired of hearing by now, I recently wrote a book on Product Management. For those of you who are too cheap to buy it (I kid, I kid1), there is now an edited chapter excerpt up on Smashing Magazine. In Why Companies Need Full-Time Product Managers (And What They Do All Day) I give my definition of Product Management, and go into some of the characteristics of a good PM. Also:

The truth is that, to be effective, the role of a manager for a particular product or...

It’s not often you have a vote that might create a new, independent nation. But that’s what’s happening today with Scotland. It’s such a big event that you’d think Google and Bing would be doing something special to provide election results. That’s not the case.

Both search engines have long done special presentations for US elections or even sporting events like the recent World Cup and Olympics. But the referendum on whether the country of Scotland would separate from the United Kingdom —...

Mark Traphagen posted on Google+ that Google started dropping a lot of the Google+ elements you'd find in the Google Knowledge Box on the right hand side of the page...

When Google introduced us to the knowledge graph, it also introduced us to pictures and the possibility of other kinds of rich content (video, audio, etc.) in those knowledge panels, and pictorial lists displayed in carousels at the top of pages in...

Onur Ã-zcan informed me on Twitter that Google has supposedly slapped several large Turkish news sites for content spam and keyword stuffing on their sites...

This is officially part of the story I’m telling in a presentation I prepared for SMX East, in a couple of weeks in New York. The name of the session I’m in is “Hummingbird and the Entity Revolution,” which reminds me of a Prince song from the...