Industry News

David Carr in For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated:

Email newsletters, an old-school artifact of the web that was supposed to die along with dial-up connections, are not only still around, but very much on the march. [...]

And:

Email is a 40-year-old technology that is not going away for very good reasons — it’s the cockroach of the Internet.

Well, I confess that I have also succumbed to the lure of this particular cockroach, and have been experimenting with a...

I don’t quite get the style of John Herrman’s Internet, Why So Blue?1, but this bit about why hyperlinks started out blue is quite interesting:

The man who invented links2 was writing them to a grayscale screen. The first popular browser, Mosaic, later turned links blue because it was the darkest color available at the time that wasn’t black; they needed to stand out, but only just. Blue was the best alternative. Blue always survives the focus group. Blue wins the a/b test. Which is...

A couple of weeks ago, we told you Google is working on a new href lang webmaster feature that Google would not disclose. In fact, Google was asking for beta testers to sign non-disclosure agreements, if they wanted to participate in the beta.

Well...

Google began removing listings in response to the EU’s new Right To Be Forgotten mandate last week. As promised, Google is also disclosing to searchers when such removals have happened. However, it is also confusingly reporting that removals may have happened even when they have not. Welcome to Google’s new blanket notice that all name-based searches are now subject to censorship. The Removal Notice

Notices, according to a source familiar with how Google is handling these, are supposed to...

Mills Baker wrote one of the best analyses I’ve seen on the the design of messaging apps in his comparison of Slingshot and Snapchat:

Snapchat seems eager to support naturalness in communication, which can be considered in terms of deformation. It wants to combat draining formalities, make it possible for all parties in an interaction to behave as they wish without anxiety, without fear of publicity or permanence, without the burden of modal moments. In other words: it wants the full...

Can you redirect a penalty to a new or different domain name? Let's say site A has a bad link penalty, either manual action or algorithmic issue. And you or a competitor decide to use a 301 redirect from site A to a site without a penalty (i.e. site B). Would site A's penalty cause site B to get a penalty also?

In Punctuated Equilibrium Joe Pinsker reports on an atrocity that doesn’t get nearly enough press — the death of the apostrophe:

A battle is being waged over the apostrophe, and the names of two of the online factions—the Apostrophe Protection Society and Kill the Apostrophe—suggest an extremism usually reserved for blood, rather than ink or pixels. The former, founded by a retired British copy editor, provides a gentle guide to deploying the apostrophe. “It is indeed a threatened...

Two recent articles about technology and our perception of time make some interesting related points. From the clickbaity (yet surprisingly good) Feeling More Antsy and Irritable Lately? Blame Your Smartphone1:

Our gadgets train us to expect near instantaneous responses to our actions, and we quickly get frustrated and annoyed at even brief delays. I know that my own perception of time has been changed by technology. If I go from using a fast computer or Web connection to using even a...

Tom Jacobs discusses some new research that shows people are more comfortable sharing their medical information with virtual people in I’d Never Admit That to My Doctor. But to a Computer? Sure. The implications are interesting:

When it comes to fixing our healthcare system, very few people would agree that part of the answer lies in less human interaction. Patients generally want more, not less, contact with health professionals. Yet this study suggests that, at least for the intake...

Copy is one of the most important aspects of onsite Search Engine Optimization. But with Google constantly pushing new algorithm updates and changing the rules of the game, it’s really hard to keep track of what works. Moreover, it’s difficult to know whether your optimization efforts are doing more harm than good to your rankings.

Here are 13 tips that will help you write content that ranks in 2014.

Last year I, I teamed up with SEO Extraordinaire, Henrik Bondtofte to bring you the 2013...