Industry News

Paul Ford’s The Great Works of Software is definitely going on my “Best of 2014″ list:

The greatest works of software are not just code or programs, but social, expressive, human languages. They give us a shared set of norms and tools for expressing our ideas about words, or images, or software development. Great software gives us tremendous freedom, as long as we work within its boundaries.

Seriously, read the whole thing…

It is not every day you see SEM companies featured in Wall Street Journal articles but a few weeks ago, they ran a story named Small Businesses Search in Vain for Web-Ad Help.
It isn't good.
It calls out two very large SEM companies ...

Gabs at Cre8asite Forums noticed that just recently, Amazon has lost their rich snippets in the Google search results.

About a year ago, Amazon had rich snippets even without them adding the rich snippet markups for product reviews...

Matt Cutts, Google's face of search for webmasters, posted a future telling video yesterday on when and how Google may rely less on links in the future for ranking pages...

April was another month chock full of Google webmaster and SEO tidbits. We also suspected at least two updates, FYI, there were some signs of a possible update on May 2nd, although that buzz died down quickly...

Five days ago I reported on a post where a personality in our industry questions the ethics and morals of Google after he posted the private conversation he had with Google's Matt Cutts while at SMX West.

I am not going to go into what he said here, you can read it on

In The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies Rebekah Campbell looks at the problem with lying in the context of entrepreneurship and creating products:

Peter maintains that telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a...

Steven Sinofsky wrote some excellent advice for product managers in his post Shipping is a Feature: Some Guiding Principles for People Who Build Things. I especially like this part:

A decision means to not do something, and to achieve clarity in your design. The classic way this used to come up (and still does) is the inevitable “make it an option”. You can’t decide should a new mouse wheel scroll or zoom? Should there be conversation view or inbox view? Should you AutoCorrect or not? Go...

Incisive Media, which purchased the Search Engine Strategies conference when it was near the height of attendance, killed the brand entirely last year in place of a new ClickZ Live event. But now, after what seems to have been a disaster of the first ClickZ Live show, the company is scrambling back to revive SES. The Rise & Fall Of SES

Conflict of interest time. My company, Third Door Media, competes with Incisive in the event space. For those who don’t know, I’m the guy who programmed the...