Industry News

Yesterday during the video hangout with Google's John Mueller I asked if the mobile first indexing rollout was at all related to what folks were seeing with this past weekend's Google algorithm update. In short, John said no, they are unrelated...

Janna Bastow wrote a great post on product management for maturing products. From Growing up Lean: Lean Strategies for Maturing Products, here’s a recommendation for how to avoid becoming a “Feature Factory”:

Break the backlog up into two parts: The Product Backlog and the Development Backlog. […]

Product Backlog: A list of all of the things you could do. You’ll never complete everything on this list, and it’ll always be in a constant state of flux. It’ll include customer...

Google announced yesterday that they are now rolling out mobile-first indexing to sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.

Oh boy, where to begin with Craig Mod’s interview with Offscreen Magazine. I’ve been following Craig’s work for a long time, so I have an undeniable bias towards everything he does. But some of the things he says in this interview touched a deep nerve for me, as it relates to a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately.

It’s a long interview, and you should absolutely take the time to read it all. I’ll just post a couple of my favorite quotes here.

On the revival of print and...

As I mentioned in my Friday video, there seemed to be some chatter around the algorithm update starting back up again after a number of days of calm. Well, the weekend got pretty heated with chatter within the community...

If you’re in the business of content marketing, I know you’ve seen advice like this: “Start with your customer personas.” “Create content that will resonate with your customers.” “Great content is content that your customers actually want to consume.” It sounds compelling. But in my experience, it’s wrong. Or at least, incomplete. Why? #1) Because, most content marketing goals are…

The post Contrarian Take: Don’t Start Your Content Marketing with “What Do My Customers Want?” appeared...

I can’t get this quote from Dan Cohen’s Back to the Blog out of my head:

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase...

Martin MacDonald notified me on Twitter of Google Flights spamming Google with links in their footers and potentially even hiding links to users but not GoogleBot...

This story by Rene Chun about China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech is wild:

Don’t even think about jaywalking in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Last year, traffic-management authorities there started using facial recognition to crack down. When a camera mounted above one of 50 of the city’s busiest intersections detects a jaywalker, it snaps several photos and records a video of the violation. The photos appear on an overhead screen so the offender can see that he or she...