Industry News

All this back and forth on when Google will launch Penguin 4.0 is getting to everyone. Will it be Q1, why wasn't it in January or in 2015...

When everything about your life is out in the open, there is power in keeping some of it secret. The ironic side-effect of social media is that it makes it easier to hide. When people think that you share everything, they don’t expect you to keep anything secret.

I recently went on a brief trip to South Africa to visit family, and I stayed (mostly) off social media. It felt weird—I felt this strange guilt, like I was “hiding” something because so many of my friends didn’t even know I was...

Abby Covert wrote a brilliant and passionate plea for a return to the basic principles of Information Architecture in our design work. From The Pain With No Name:

In too many cases, educational programs in design and technology have stopped teaching or even talking about IA. Professionals in the web industry have stopped teaching their clients about its importance. Reasons for this include “navigation is dead,” “the web is bottom up, not top down,” and “search overthrew structure”—but...

Cliff Kuang makes some interesting points in his essay The Secret UX Issues That Will Make (Or Break) Self-Driving Cars:

Recall that first principle that [Brian Lathrop at Volkswagen] laid out for designing autonomous cars—that the driver has to know whether the car is driving itself. That harks to probably the oldest dictate in interface design; mode confusion causes 90% of airplane crashes, and that insight helped invent the field of human-computer interaction. Think about all the...

For those wondering when Google will release Penguin 4.0, well - I don't have any new information for you. We expected it in 2015 and the holidays delayed it to 2016... Gary Illyes doesn't know...

Last night, Bill Hartzer spotted that the link operator, i.e. [link:www.seroundtable.com] no longer returns results. Well, he is right, for some domains but for others, it does seem to work.



But for sites like [link:searchengineland.com] it does work:



In short...

I am not qualified to talk about politics so don’t worry, I won’t. That said, Spencer Kornhaber’s essay on Beyoncé’s Radical Halftime Statement is so incredibly good (and very applicable to product design) that it’s worth discussing here. The part that I found particularly interesting is how differently Beyoncé and Coldplay view their “target markets”. Beyoncé is very focused:

But in pop and in politics, “everyone” is a loaded term. Stars as ubiquitous as Beyoncé have haters, the...

Paula La Farge challenges the idea that ebooks are inferior to physical books in The Deep Space of Digital Reading:

There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers,...

Often I'll see webmasters and SEOs say that they see a huge spike in GoogleBot crawl activity on their web sites and thus, they are expecting to see an update in the upcoming days...

Facebook’s “On This Day” feature has always felt really strange to me. It’s an algorithm that’s aware of its weirdness, hence the almost apologetic “We care about you and the memories you share here” message that surrounds it. As if it knows it’s bound to get it wrong and show you something you don’t want to be reminded of.

Leigh Alexander provides an interesting perspective on that feature and our social media “memories” in What Facebook’s On This Day shows about the fragility of our...