Industry News

Gary Graham writes about some of the dangers of the smart city movement in Too-smart cities? Why these visions of utopia need an urgent reality check:

Ideally a future city will have inner-city areas that are sustainably created through private, for-profit initiatives, and investment based on genuine competitive advantage — not through artificial inducements, charity or government mandates.

The people living in cities far outnumber the people making decisions about what those...

In January of 2011, Google’s Matt Cutts published a blog post on the Official Google Blog, titled Google search and search engine spam which told us:

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as...

At SMX West, Google's Matt Cutts said something very interesting. I tweeted it and Matt Cutts responded but that made it even more interesting...

Tim Wu brings up some interesting points in Why Making Technology Easier to Use Isn’t Always Good:

We make ourselves into what we, as a species, will become, mainly through our choices as consumers. If you accept these premises, our choice of technological tools becomes all-important; by the logic of biological atrophy, our unused skills and capacities tend to melt away, like the tail of an ape. It may sound overly dramatic, but the use of demanding technologies may actually be important...

danah boyd wrote an interesting op-ed for TIME called Let Kids Run Wild Online. She argues that restrictive monitoring software is not the way to go to keep teens safe online:

The key to helping youth navigate contemporary digital life isn’t more restrictions. It’s freedom plus communication. Famed urban theorist Jane Jacobs used to argue that the safest neighborhoods were those where communities collectively took interest in and paid attention to what happened on the streets. Safety...

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A recent survey has yielded shocking results: one in ten Americans considers HTML to be a sexually transmitted disease. This sounds funny, doesn’t it? Now consider one of the other survey questions. It also asked what SEO means. Here is the response: Safe Energy Optimisation – 41% Standard Engine Output – 36% Search Engine Optimisation – 23%

A whopping “77% of respondents could not identify what SEO means.” the Sun Sentinel writes.

You could now argue that Americans are stupid or...

Google has penalized a few more international link networks on Friday afternoon. Google went after, as promised Italian and Spanish networks and those who participated in them - as well as a couple more Germany link networks...

This navigation article by Gerry McGovern is from 2006, but it’s still so spot on. I’ll quote this one bit from Web Navigation is About Moving Forward, but you should definitely read the whole thing:

Navigation should primarily be about helping us keep on going in the direction we have chosen. If I choose a link for “notebooks” then I have made a decision. Continuing to present me with links for servers and desktops decreases my ability to focus on the notebook direction I have chosen....

In WordPress: How It Came To Be And Where It’s Heading Alex Moss interviews Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, the two cofounders of WordPress. The whole interview is interesting, but their approach to technical debt caught my eye in particular:

We rewrite or refactor about 10 to 15% of WordPress in most releases, so that we can keep users getting updates and new features quickly, while doing the “ground up rebuild” incrementally in the background, fixing bugs and getting feedback as we go....