Industry News

Melissa Dahl talked to some people to find out Why You Keep Mishearing That Taylor Swift Lyric:

“There’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the sound that comes in our ear,” but another piece of our understanding comes from our minds — from our expectations, in other words. It’s easy to see how this explanation applies to many misheard lyrics, specifically the most-often cited one from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” which contains the lyrics “Excuse me while I kiss the sky”;...

I recently realized that the web services I love and use the most are all run by indie developers or small companies. While I ponder what that means, I thought I’d do my little part to tell you about them in case you’re in the market for one of these things.

These are all services I’ve used for a while and have no intention of leaving. Unless they shut down. PLEASE SUPPORT THEM SO THEY DON’T SHUT DOWN. I use Feedbin as my back-end for RSS reading. It’s solid. It always updates fast, it...

In November we reported that Firefox made a deal with Yahoo to become the default search provider, ultimately dropping Google. The search share numbers came out this week and Google, showing Google lost almost 2 percentage points of market share to Yahoo...

Now that Yahoo has gained search share from Google thanks to its Firefox deal, the search giant seems to be finally hitting back with moves to get users to switch to Google.

I’ve been checking each week since the deal was announced in November to see if Google would finally do as I expected, try to prompt those using Firefox to change back from Yahoo to Google. Yesterday evening, it finally happened.

When I used Firefox on a Windows 10 Lenovo laptop, I got this message:



You can...

Laura Sydell tells a great story in At 90, She’s Designing Tech For Aging Boomers (but when did NPR decide to go all Upworthy-like with their headlines?):

Addi says when Beskind is in a room, young designers do think differently. For example, Addi says IDEO is working with a Japanese company on glasses to replace bifocals. With a simple hand gesture, the glasses will turn from the farsighted prescription to the nearsighted one.

Initially, the designers wanted to put small...

Jason Z. Resnikoff’s Seeing the Sixties and Seventies Through 2001 and Alien is a wonderful essay about his father’s experiences as a computer scientist growing up in the era of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien. Here’s a taste:

My father was so buried in computers that when he saw 2001 he very much liked HAL, the spaceship Discovery’s villainous central computer. To this day, he enjoys quoting the part of the movie where HAL tries to explain away his own mistake—the supposed fault in...

A couple weeks ago, I reported that Google's John Mueller explained that theoretically you do not need to disavow to get out of Penguin, you can try to build links out of Penguin. But the truth is, he said it is an algorithm and he was just explaining the algorithm...

So I guess it’s quarterly “Designers should learn to code” day on Twitter. This appears to be the crux:

Good discussion today w/ friends who are "designers that code." It's no longer even a question of "Should designers learn to code?"— Nathan Smith (@nathansmith) January 20, 2015

Because that ship has sailed. It's more like… If you're a designer that doesn't code, you'll just be left behind. Not even a debate anymore.— Nathan Smith (@nathansmith) January 20, 2015

I have two...

President Barack Obama will deliver his 2015 State of the Union at 6pm PT tonight. If you didn’t know the time, you might turn to Google or Bing for an answer. And there, the White House hopes to inform you through a special post it made to rank for that query.

Right now, the State of the Union is a popular search topic in the United States, as reflected on Google Trends:



Many of those State of the Union searches involve people just wanting to know the time, as reflected by the...

The temptation was to write this blog post mostly in pictures, since it’s about visual representations of things, based sometimes on a combination of objects that were understood using object recognition, and virtual semantic images superimposed...