Industry News

The Economist tries to answer the question Why is everyone so busy? and it doesn’t tell a pretty story about ourselves. It starts with the economics of it:

When people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.

This part makes us sound like terrible human...

Fake news and images are flourishing and even Snopes can’t hold back the tide of belief. Marketers should be taking notes, not to create their own fake campaigns but to understand the psychology that makes it possible and connect that to digital marketing trends. We Want To Believe



Agent Mulder, of the X-Files, was famous for his desire to believe in aliens and all sorts of other phenomena. The truth is, we all want to believe. Maybe not in aliens but a host of other things. It’s not...

Sticking with the theme of remote work, Steven Sinofsky wrote a great post called Why Remote Engineering Is So Difficult!? There’s a lot of food for thought, but here’s the main issue:

The core challenge with remote work is not how it is defined right here and now. In fact that is often very easy. It usually only takes a single in person meeting to define how things should be split up. Then the collaboration tools can help to nurture the work and project. It is often the case that...

Adam Greenfield reminds us that the “smartness” of technologies comes from the people who use it, not the technology itself. From The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology:

It’s simply that in both these cases, the sustaining interactivity was for the most part founded on the use of mature technologies, long deglamorised and long settled into what the technology-consulting practice Gartner refers to as the “trough of disillusionment”.

The true...

Google is sending mass scale notifications via email and Webmaster Tools warning sites that are not mobile-friendly that it will cause issues for them if they want to rank well for smartphone users.

This is the first time Google is sending these notifications to these webmasters...

I really enjoyed Eddie Smith’s The ascent of failure, a post on the many ways our technology can fail us. He starts off with a parenting story that’s infinitely relatable, and goes on to make some good points about how fiddly we’ve become with our technology:

With Yosemite and iOS 8, we have even more interdependence through features like Handoff. Now, a MacBook, iPhone, and iPad are no longer three things but a system of things—an ecosystem with an even higher chance of failure by...

There are lots of great points in Chris Hardie’s Distributed vs. In-Person Teams, an article on the challenges and opportunities of remote work. But this part, in particular, stood out because I’ve experienced it myself:

Having some remote workers is harder than being fully local or fully distributed. […] This dual approach is probably a recipe for disaster when it comes to building shared vision and common culture in an organization. If there are team members who have a daily...

How many searches does Google handle per day, month or year? The company is notorious for not regularly sharing such figures. But we now know that it remains at least more than one trillion, the first update since Google last shared over two years ago.

A stat in Steven Levy’s excellent story on Backchannel yesterday, How Google Search Dealt With Mobile, said that Google handles over 3 billion searches per day. 1 Trillion Served

It was a rare sighting of a queries-per-day figure...

Google has many updates to their Structured Data Testing Tool since launching in 2009, including renaming it in 2012 but yesterdays update may be one of the larger updates.

Earlier this week, we reported on many Google AdSense publishers claiming some Google AdSense ads were auto-redirecting users from their their site to a spammy site...