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Industry News

Catch up on interesting new discussion and industry news.

    Life With Cortana, Microsoft’s Predictive Search Challenger To Google Now & Siri

    dannysullivan
    by dannysullivan
    Jul 21, 2014
    Microsoft’s new predictive search agent Cortana is finally becoming available to the general public. How does it compare to longstanding champion Google Now? After months of using them both, it’s no contest. Google Now easily wins, in my daily life. But Cortana does gives Microsoft an important foundation in the predictive search space and puts it well ahead of Apple’s own Siri. Welcome, Cortana

    Microsoft announced that Cortana would be part of Windows Phone 8.1 earlier this year....

    Google's John Mueller: Knowledge Graph Listings Should Not Be Branded

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Jul 21, 2014
    In a Google Webmaster Hangout from a week ago on Google+, John Mueller of Google was presented with a question on why some brands rank so well within the Knowledge Graph on Google.
    Here are two examples...

    Destroy email! No, don’t!

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jul 20, 2014
    In Doomed to Repeat It Paul Ford discusses our obsession with email and to-do list apps, and he makes an interesting point about this form of communication that we all love to hate:

    Is there another form of communication besides email where the acknowledged goal is to hide all of the communication? Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face. Yet even the tragically...

    The robots are coming, but that’s ok

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jul 20, 2014
    The AP is increasingly starting to use software with no human intervention to write basic news stories, but Kevin Roose says that we shouldn’t be alarmed about it. From his article Why Robot Journalism Is Great for Journalists:

    Robot assistance may even spur human reporters to do our jobs better. With software producing the equivalent of old-school “clip files” for us, we’ll essentially have full-time research assistants. The information in our stories will be more accurate, since it...

    Don’t drink the water

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jul 20, 2014
    As a frequent flyer I started reading Michaeleen Doucleff’s How To Stay Healthy In Flight with great interest, but I cannot get this sentence out of my head:

    In 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency found high levels of fecal bacteria in the drinking water of 15 of the 327 planes it tested.

    Ummm…

    Customer request list != product roadmap

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jul 18, 2014
    Rich Mironov’s We Don’t Hire Product Owners Here is a treasure trove of advice and clear thinking on the dangers of not taking the Product Owner role seriously in companies that make the switch to Agile development. There are so many good sound bites, but I’ll stick with this just one, which hits close to home:

    Don’t let your customer request list become your roadmap. Kano analysis teaches us that letting current customers prioritize your backlog for you leads to market failure.  Don’t...

    Topography and how we see the world

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jul 18, 2014
    I don’t quite know how to describe Peter Richardson’s The Lay of the Land. It’s about topography, maps, and cartoons, but actually about how we see the world:

    Eventually I escaped my fjord, but a few lessons of my youth have been repeatedly confirmed: topography is important, and there’s no faster way to make an impression than with a cartoon. And by “cartoon” I mean a simplification which exaggerates some details and omits others. You could also say “model,” but I like the connotations...

    An introduction to technical debt

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jul 18, 2014
    Maiz Lulkin has a great overview of one of the most important and most misunderstood issues in software development in his post Technical debt 101:

    In software development, the dreadful consequences of sacrificing quality are widely misunderstood by non technical managers. They underestimate how detrimental it is to continued productivity and morale, and ultimately, to the overall strategy of the company.

    He goes on to explain why…

    eBay Admits Google Penalty Had A "Dramatic Impact" On Earnings

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Jul 18, 2014
    Back in May we reported that eBay had some sort of penalty that hit their Google search visibility by about 50%. That is major but now we somewhat know how major.

    Danny Sullivan reports on Search Engine Land that it may have costed them $200 million...

    How to Prove ROI Potential of Content Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday

    Jul 17, 2014
    We all know that creating and promoting content can be a ton of work (not to mention expensive). So how do we know whether it'll be worth it? In today's Whiteboard Friday, MozCon 2014 speaker Mike King shows you several ways you can be sure your content has the potential you need before you even start making it.



    For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!...