Industry News

Liz Pelly’s Streambait Pop is a fascinating look at the “Spotify sound” and other changes in pop music brought about by streaming:

The Spotify sound has a few different variations, but essentially it’s a formula. “It has this soft, emo-y, cutesy thing to it,” Matt says. “These days it’s often really minimal and based around just a few simple elements in verses. Often a snap in the verses. And then the choruses sometimes employ vocal samples. It’s usually kind of emo in lyrical...

The Google search results and rankings have been pretty unstable the past week or so. There are a lot of fluctuations happening from earlier this week and also as of yesterday. Both the automated tracking tools and the SEO communities are taking notice.

Google may have pushed out their first larger search algorithm update of 2019 over this weekend. It may have started around January 5th or 6th and it seems to be continuing on through today - the 7th. There is both chatter within the SEO community and ranking tools validating the shifts in the Google search results.

unsplash-logoTristan Colangelo

Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several...

Empowered Product Teams is another gem of a post from Marty Cagan. This part stood out to me:

In most companies, technology teams exist “to serve the business.” That is very often the literal phrase you will hear. But even if they aren’t explicit about it, the different parts of the business end up driving what is actually built by the technology teams.

However, in contrast, in strong product organizations, teams exist for a very different purpose. They exist “to serve the...

In our first monthly recap for 2019 we covered a couple smaller unconfirmed Google updates. It was a slower month with the holidays and New Years but Google launched some new features...

A lot of words are being written about AI and machine learning these days, so it’s sometimes hard to know what to pay attention to. M.C. Elish and danah boyd’s Don’t Believe Every AI You See is one of those essays that I would consider essential reading on the topic. On the ethics of artificial intelligence:

When we consider the ethical dimensions of AI deployments, in nearly every instance the imagined capacity of a technology does not match up with current reality. As a result,...

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.