Industry News

Can you believe, the last official Google Panda refresh/update was Panda 4.1 on September 25, 2014? We've seen updates to it since, but those updates stopped around October 24, 2015, which is 5 months and 2 weeks or so ago.
I asked John Mueller of Google in a Google+ handout

In 2009, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web recorded the following TED Presentation about Linked Open Data. This video describes his next idea for a use for the Web, where Data is shared and can flow freely, published by people...

There has recently been a lot of confusion around the Panda algorithm, specifically if it is running monthly, in real time, or still manual. The answer, at least today, is that not only is the data for Panda manually updated but also Penguin...

So a question many folks have been thinking about in regards to the April 21st mobile-friendly Google algorithm was what if a brand is not mobile-friendly and someone searches for them after April 21st on their mobile device...

Scott Sehlhorst wrote a really good defense of good product roadmaps in Features do not a Product Roadmap Make:

If your roadmap says “Will include update quantity control in shopping cart” you’re doing it wrong.  Your roadmap should say “Improved shopping experience on mobile” or “Better shopping experience for spearfisher  persona.” […]

When a roadmap is being used to communicate “what” the product will be, it should be in the language of describing which problems will be...

Marty Cagan has some really insightful thoughts (as usual) on autonomous teams in Autonomy vs. Mission:

In healthy teams and organizations, the way we normally reconcile these views [where the team might have one perspective and the leadership might very well have another] is that the leadership has control of two major inputs to the decision process. The first is the overall product vision, and the second are the specific business objectives assigned to each team.

Problems...

Google is now bolding the answers in the search results when quick answers are displayed at the top of the page, in the knowledge graph box area...

John Willshire wrote a good post on the difference between fidelity and resolution in design. From Want to improve your design process? Question your fidelity:

For us, fidelity is all about the people axis; how close is this to the real world? That’s the future point, when the product is out in front of lots of people, being used often, at scale. If you want to increase fidelity, then you show whatever you have to more people.

Which leaves the vertical axis, things, to be all...

Judy Wajcman’s Who’s to blame for the digital time deficit? starts off like many similar articles as she ponders the role smart phones play in making us feel time-starved. But then she takes an unexpected and well-reasoned turn:

If technology is going to contribute to a better world, people must think about the world in which they want to live. Put simply, it means thinking about social problems first and then thinking of technological solutions, rather than inventing technologies and...

Ben Thompson wrote the best analysis of Tidal I’ve seen so far. From Tidal and the Future of Music:

I would again draw an analogy to venture capital: startups can spread via Twitter or new discovery services like Product Hunt; minimum viable products are cheaper to build than ever thanks to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.; and distribution channels like App Stores have natural promotional channels. And yet the importance – and amount – of venture capital has never been...