Industry News

I’ve been a long-time subscriber and fan of Craig Mod’s newsletter. In the latest edition he has some really interesting thoughts on Instagram, and social media in general:

Instagram will only get more complex, less knowable, more algorithmic, more engagement-hungry in 2019.

I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best. And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is...

Happy New Years everyone - here is to an awesome, successful, healthy, happy and consistent 2019! See what I did there? Anyway, today is New Years and to celebrate, the search engines have special logos and themes up.

I’ve been thinking about Cal Newport’s post called Join Analog Social Media all day, especially as we get to the end of another year:

The dynamic at play here is that digital activities that are mildly positive in isolation, combine to crowd out other real world activities that are potentially much more satisfying. This is what allows you to love Twitter in the moment when you discover a hilarious tweet, but at the end of the day fear that the app is degrading your soul....

In Filling the Silence with Digital Noise, Kate Moran and Kim Flaherty share some research-based findings on how people use digital background noise to make sure it’s never quiet around them:

While many participants reported feeling the need to have some sort of audio in the background during their silent moments, others reported a more intense version of this phenomenon: the need to fill all the empty moments in their lives with some activity to avoid boredom or downtime. This...

The Netflix Data War is a very interesting post about the internal discussions that happen between Netflix’s content team and their data team. In short, data isn’t everything:

[…] in almost any decision-making situation involving data, there is some non-zero percentage of the process that involves “gut”. The reason is because not all information about a process can be incorporated into a data analysis, and it’s important for data analysts to realize that.

That’s an important...

The Doist team makes some great points in their article Best Practices for Building and Managing a Remote Team, including something we’re embracing very strongly at Wildbit as well:

Managing a remote team effectively is not about monitoring the amount of time your team members spend online (in fact, that’s a great way to kill employee autonomy and motivation). It’s about building and supporting a team that doesn’t need to be micromanaged in the first place.

We wrote more about...

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, testified before congress not too long ago (as you may remember) and one thing that he said that stood out to me was that Google has over a thousand people working on core search. It wasn't clear if those were just engineers or it also included contractors, designers, Doodlers, etc.

In The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected, Craig Mod writes that after years of believing books will fundamentally change in the digital age, it’s simply not happening:

I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice.

What has changed, instead, is how books are created:

Instead, technology changed everything that enables...

Over the past few months, Google added to their link schemes guideliens page a line that basically says you cannot require someone to link to you without the nofollow attribute. If you require such a follow link in your terms of service, a contract or some other arrangement, then that is considered a "link scheme" by Google.