Industry News

A core algorithm update, the mobile-first indexing rollout begins, zero search results tested, image search captions...

I should stop reading (and writing) about Facebook at some point, but there’s been some really interesting thinking around the social internet in general recently. I especially enjoyed Benedict Evans’s The death of the newsfeed, because it puts into words a lot of things I’ve been thinking about. On the social implications of algorithmic feeds:

One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or...

News broke last night that Google's current head of search, John Giannandrea, was stepping down and replacing him are two Google veterans Jeff Dean will lead Google's AI efforts...

This is a fairly old post, but I only recently came across Dan McKinley’s Choose Boring Technology. It is so good.

What counts as boring? That’s a little tricky. “Boring” should not be conflated with “bad.” There is technology out there that is both boring and bad. You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough. MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Squid is...

When the design community wants to argue about something they fall back on the age-old question, “Should designers learn to code?” In the same way, for as long as the role has existed, the product management community has debated whether or not PMs should be referred to as “the CEO of the product.”

Neither debate will ever be settled — this is just something we do. But Marty Cagan does have a solid addition to this never-ending argument in his post CEO of the Product Revisited. His main...

Stories about how technology can be bad for our health is not new, of course. But two articles in this particular genre caught my attention this week. The first is some HBR research showing that Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking (Even When It’s Silent and Facedown):

The mere presence of our smartphones is like the sound of our names or a crying baby — something that automatically exerts a gravitational pull on our attention. Resisting that pull takes a...

There may have been another update late March 27th, mostly on March 28th and through today, with the Google search rankings. I am seeing an uptick in chatter from the SEO community...

I’m always on the lookout for faster ways to upload and insert images into blog posts. It’s the part of the blogging workflow that I dislike the most. Up to now I’ve used a pretty convoluted combination of Amazon S3 buckets and Transmit. But over the weekend, while moving hosting providers1, I finally came up with a really simple image upload workflow that I thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else.

This workflow lets you drag and drop an image to a menu bar icon on your Mac, and...