Industry News

In August 2012, to stem accusations that it doesn’t do enough to fight piracy, Google released what’s known as the Pirate Update, a system that penalized sites deemed to be violating copyright laws. Next week, Google is finally going to refresh that system to catch new offenders and release others that may have cleaned up their acts.

Google announced the new Pirate Update — call it Pirate Update 2 — will come out next week, along with new ad and editorial formats it says may help stem...

In my first Patent Free Friday, I was going to write about two of the best marketers in the town I live in, a pair of bakers who bake on either end of the historic Main Street in Warrenton Virginia. I guess getting up in the early morning to bake...

Google came under fire last night from Stephen Colbert, over a direct answer that got the comedian’s height wrong. But Apple’s Siri makes the same mistake — something Colbert didn’t raise during his video appearance at the Apple’s iPad event today.

Stephen Colbert Demands Google Apology For Getting His Height Wrong on our Marketing Land site covers Colbert’s send-up of Google on his show last night, completely with a demand for an apology from Google CEO Larry Page.

Google, he noted,...

Marty Cagan wrote one of his characteristically great posts in Product vs. IT Mindset. In one particularly harsh section he describes what happens when the people who make decisions about a product are far removed from those who make the product:

In IT mindset companies, accountability frankly is a farce. The people actually working on a project typically have no real say in what they are building, and sometimes even in how it’s built, and even when it’s due. In theory, the leadership...

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Recently I have published a post on my biggest mistakes of the last decade. One of them was sticking to the cryptic SEO acronym itself.

Mere mortals still don’t know what SEO means let alone how it works.

Why don’t we just use common words everybody can understand? Yes, there are some terms average people can fathom.

 

Keeping it simple

You may know me already. I don’t talk about re-branding as some kind of marketing. Improving websites has always been more than marketing...

Googe recently started showing “How to” lists in search results, which tend to show the first few steps of some task, and then let you click through to a page to see more. Like the recipes above for things like guacamole: They have also published an...

The Wall Street Journal's piece named Ads Tied to Web Searches Criticized as Deceptive (search for the title in Google and click from there to get the full story for free) shows how the FTC is preventing Google and other search engines from "deceiving" searchers into clicking on their ads...

I try not to overwhelm you with posts about the product management book I wrote recently, but I do think this deserves a post. After a few hiccups, Making It Right is now available in paperback on Amazon, through CreateSpace Independent Publishing.

If you like papery things and margins, I’m sure you will like it.

Buy ‘Making It Right’ on Amazon.

Peter Morville’s Creating a Cultural Fit: Using ethnography with users and stakeholders is one of the most useful UX articles I’ve read in a while. He talks about the importance of understanding the cultures of both users and companies to create good products. He concludes:

In short, the right design is one that fits the company and its customers. A mismatch on either side results in fatal error. We must use ethnography with our users and stakeholders to search for a bi-cultural fit....

Revisting the Subscribed Links Patent Five Years Later and Finding the Rich Snippets Patent I first looked at this patent five years ago, but called it the Subscribed Links Patent. At the time, Google had a Subscribed links program, where site...