Industry News

I’ve been thinking about the topic of my latest A List Apart column for a while, but I was just too scared to write it. I mean, what right do I have to talk about work and privilege? But I ran the idea by my amazing editor, and since she was really supportive and enthusiastic about it, I went for it.

So I wrote Why?:

Why we work—and what kind of work we do—is a function of our privilege and our history as much as it is a function of our choices and our dedication.

I hope you...

The figures are in, and once again, search marketing is a powerhouse. According to the IAB, search made up 50% of all digital ad spend last year.

Over on Marketing Land, we have the full-breakdown of the figures: Digital Ad Spend Hits New $49.5 Billion High In 2014; Mobile & Social See Greatest Growth. While channels like social and mobile saw more growth, search remained the biggest spend overall.

I’m still working up some figures on the search growth story. It’s complicated, because...

It seems like after waiting 24 hours, Google may have just started to change the mobile search results to factor in the mobile friendly update...

Aaron Shapiro makes some interesting observations in The Next Big Thing In Design? Less Choice:

Technology has revolutionized the way we live our lives and do business, but it has done a terrible job reducing the stress of so many decisions. Industry by industry, great digital design has eliminated middlemen from the economy and put users in control, making it fast and easy for us to determine what we want and purchase it directly, whether on a computer or over a phone. Now, with...

Chris Baraniuk looks at the futility of things like traffic signal buttons in Press me! The buttons that lie to you:

Some would call this a “placebo button”—a button which, objectively speaking, provides no control over a system, but which to the user at least is psychologically fulfilling to push. It turns out that there are plentiful examples of buttons which do nothing and indeed other technologies which are purposefully designed to deceive us. But here’s the really surprising...

Google will begin rolling out the mobile friendly update today, as they confirmed yesterday. Despite Google telling us you may not notice the image until the update rolls out over the course of a few weeks, SEOs and webmasters are manually...

There is all this fear around today's release of the mobile friendly algorithm, so much so it is being called Mobilegeddon. I hate that name because this is NOT a web spam algorithm like Panda or Penguin, it is just a benefit for those that go mobile friendly...

I’m not usually one to freak out about kids and technology use, but Bruce Feiler makes some interesting points in Hey, Kids, Look at Me When We’re Talking:

Dr. [Clifford Nass, a communication professor at Stanford University] told me about research he was doing that suggested young people were spending so much time looking into screens that they were losing the ability to read nonverbal communications and learn other skills necessary for one-on-one interactions. As a dorm supervisor,...

In The Machines Are Coming, Zeynep Tufekci talks about the kind of tasks that are being automated by machines:

Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.

Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater,...

Google confirmed this morning that the mobile friendly algorithm that was scheduled to be released tomorrow is still on schedule to go live tomorrow.

The roll out, as we discussed, can take weeks to fully rollout...