Industry News

The Homework Apocalypse is an interesting post by Ethan Mollick on how educators can prepare for (and, to a degree, embrace) the incoming prevalence of LLMs in schools:

Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want...

Michael Lopp discusses how communication works in large organizations. I’ve been thinking about the culture on anonymous workplace app Blind as “Nextdoor for companies”, but this is a way better description:

The Whisper Network is a rich tapestry of partially true information. My gut is to call this the Gossip Network, but gossip is just one of the information types that traverse this network. The Whisper Network is a semi-deliberate construction of humans who might trust each other but...

I am really trying to not cover the Google search ranking volatility and not report on another Google search ranking update but today things got super heated again. And don't get me wrong, the Google search results have been very heated for over a month but today, things spiked above those new normal levels.

On Monday, I reported that Google stopped crawling and indexing Twitter content after Twitter made it that unregistered (signed-out) users were not able to see tweets. Well, Twitter made a change in the past 24 hours or so that now Google and unregistered users can see the tweet but there is a modal that overlays asking users to sign up for Twitter.

If I had to sum up this month, I'd call it the month of way too many unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. I wrote about five of these, but it felt like there were even more. Google pushed a quality update for its Search Generative Experience. Google dropped a ton of SEO topics and finally launched the perspectives filter.

Technology and product Pledge To Executives →

Marty Cagan’s latest is all about the agreements between product teams and executive teams. This point about deadlines stood out for me:

Product teams ask that only the product team that will be responsible for delivering on a promise be the one to make that promise, and they not be asked to make a promise or deliver on a commitment where they don’t know what is involved and what would be required to succeed. How will AI affect workers?...

It feels weird to write a ChatGPT article. There are already so many. But there’s one particular use case that I haven’t really seen any discussion about, and it’s also one that points to what ChatGPT is good at—and what it’s terrible at.

First, the context. I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while, but two essays from old internet legends like myself (I’m referring to the old part, not the legend part) got me to finally sit down and do it. First is Andy Baio’s AI is killing...

We are back with you with another report of another unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update. This one seemed to have kicked off yesterday, June 28th and is heating up even more today. Yea, it has been a very volatile past several weeks with the Google Search results and even I am kind of tired on reporting on this.

A few months ago, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing, told us and even showed us an example, of a new Sitemap Index Coverage Report within Bing Webmaster Tools. It seems some are now seeing this report live for some of their verified profiles within Bing Webmaster Tools.

Ask Questions, Repeat The Hard Parts, and Listen

Michael Lopp’s latest is an excellent reminder of what good leadership is all about:

Earlier in this piece, I wrote I was disappointed when you asked me to decide. I’m not disappointed in you; I’m disappointed with myself. See, my primary job as your leader is to give you the skills and experience I’ve gained over the years. If I cannot guide you toward making the decision, I’m reminded I’ve not yet achieved my primary goal in our...