Industry News

It’s official. NORAD Tracks Santa, the annual Santa tracking effort run by the joint US-Canadian air defense organization, will be using Microsoft’s Bing for the second year to map Santa’s route. But will Google be mapping Santa on a different route, as happened when it ran its own breakaway tracking service last year? There’s hope of perhaps a “Miracle On 34th Street” moment that may prevent this. No One Tells Santa Where To Fly

Let’s be clear about one thing. Santa Claus flies wherever...

Happy Thanksgiving (and Hanukkah - rare overlap) to all our readers. Today I wanted to share with you the logos, doodles, themes, designs and animations from the search industry...

I read two really great articles this week about a couple of recent language shifts. The first is Megan Garber’s English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet, all about the “because-noun”:

However it originated, though, the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: “It means something like ‘I’m so busy being totally absorbed...

A senior Google AdWords advertiser and consultant, Whitey, posted in the WebmasterWorld forums that he has seen new cases of Google AdWords employees stealing or trying to poach clients away from AdWords agencies...

As we all know by now, The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is selfie. That annoying, ubiquitous self-portrait that you just can’t get away from no matter what social network you participate in (and taken to its illogical, wonderful extreme by mrpimpgoodgame on Instagram).

Most of the coverage of the culture of selfies is understandably negative about this seemingly overly narcissistic behavior. So it was with great interest that I read Casey Cep’s In Praise of Selfies: From...

Google announced that Google Places for Business has added a new section for business owners to manage and respond to reviews left on their Google Maps business listings.

Google said:

Today...

I just read the following sentence in some digital strategy PDF thing:

As digital adds value to the customer experience there is an opportunity to amplify what the person experiences on the application.

I have no idea what that means, and I don’t think anyone does. The state of business writing is just abysmal right now. So many words that sound fancy but don’t mean a thing. Here’s another example from something I had to read last week:

Economic volatility plus consumer tech...

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Sometimes you need someone to tell you what you think. I’m writing so much recently and often I’m tempted to write longer articles than necessary because content size seems to be a quality factor recently so that it gets hard to formulate simple truths.

Two weeks ago I asked my followers on Google+ whether SEOs are selling out to Google and offering Google Adwords instead of optimization.

A few good answers have been provided by some well respected industry experts and some of my...

This Interview with Clive Thompson About Twitter, Ambient Awareness, Socrates, and Recency Bias is really interesting. Clive has a decidedly more positive take on technology than what we’ve come to expect recently:

There’s an idea, popular with many text-based folks—like myself, and many journalists and academics—that reading books is thinking; that if you’re not sitting for hours reading a tome, you’re not, in some essential way, thinking. This is completely false. A huge amount of our...