Industry News

Austin Hill wrote what is so far the best critique I’ve seen of apps like Whisper and Secret. Here’s the general point from his essay On your permanent record:

When a participant in iterative prisoners’ dilemma has no identity or feels free from the responsibility of their actions in social interactions communities quickly degenerate into a race to the bottom. This is when trolls, abusers and the worst part of our humanity starts to become a strategic advantage in seeing your actions get...

In the excellent Reading to Have Read Ian Bogost sums up why I’m not a fan of Spritz, a speed-reading app that’s been making the rounds:

In today’s attention economy, reading materials (we call it “content” now) have ceased to be created and disseminated for understanding. Instead, they exist first (and primarily) for mere encounter. This condition doesn’t necessarily signal the degradation of reading; it also arises from the surplus of content we are invited and even expected to read....

Gary Graham writes about some of the dangers of the smart city movement in Too-smart cities? Why these visions of utopia need an urgent reality check:

Ideally a future city will have inner-city areas that are sustainably created through private, for-profit initiatives, and investment based on genuine competitive advantage — not through artificial inducements, charity or government mandates.

The people living in cities far outnumber the people making decisions about what those...

In January of 2011, Google’s Matt Cutts published a blog post on the Official Google Blog, titled Google search and search engine spam which told us:

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as...

At SMX West, Google's Matt Cutts said something very interesting. I tweeted it and Matt Cutts responded but that made it even more interesting...

Tim Wu brings up some interesting points in Why Making Technology Easier to Use Isn’t Always Good:

We make ourselves into what we, as a species, will become, mainly through our choices as consumers. If you accept these premises, our choice of technological tools becomes all-important; by the logic of biological atrophy, our unused skills and capacities tend to melt away, like the tail of an ape. It may sound overly dramatic, but the use of demanding technologies may actually be important...

danah boyd wrote an interesting op-ed for TIME called Let Kids Run Wild Online. She argues that restrictive monitoring software is not the way to go to keep teens safe online:

The key to helping youth navigate contemporary digital life isn’t more restrictions. It’s freedom plus communication. Famed urban theorist Jane Jacobs used to argue that the safest neighborhoods were those where communities collectively took interest in and paid attention to what happened on the streets. Safety...

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A recent survey has yielded shocking results: one in ten Americans considers HTML to be a sexually transmitted disease. This sounds funny, doesn’t it? Now consider one of the other survey questions. It also asked what SEO means. Here is the response: Safe Energy Optimisation – 41% Standard Engine Output – 36% Search Engine Optimisation – 23%

A whopping “77% of respondents could not identify what SEO means.” the Sun Sentinel writes.

You could now argue that Americans are stupid or...

Google has penalized a few more international link networks on Friday afternoon. Google went after, as promised Italian and Spanish networks and those who participated in them - as well as a couple more Germany link networks...