Industry News

In creating a knowledge base, there seem to be a number of approaches that can be used to supply entities and facts from sources like web pages and query logs. In my last post, I wrote about how search queries might be used, along with linguistic...

Millions of searches stream into Google everyday as people try to meet their informational and situational needs. But those searches don’t disappear after the searches. They provide Google with some very interesting and useful information in return....

A while ago I wrote about expanded customer journey maps as a way to plan for device-agnostic design. But that document is only half the story. Expanded customer journey maps are great because they force us to plan what content will be needed before we move to page layout. That provides a great starting point, but crossing the chasm between knowing what content should go on a page, and how to design the best layout for that content can still be quite difficult.

What we need is an effective...

The black hat and gray SEO communities are buzzing about Google's latest efforts to target PBNs, Private Blog Networks.

Over the past couple days, Google has reportedly went after many PBNs that are being used to manipulate their rankings...

Buffer's Courtney Seiter posted their August content report documenting an issue when they migrated from HTTP to HTTPS this past month.

Initially...

Entities change all the time, and facts about them do as well. Derek Jeter retires from playing baseball and becomes a coach(?). Tom Cruise acts in a new movie, and decides to direct and produce it as well(?). Scotland decides whether or not it...

In the midst of the recent brouhaha about Markdown1, Craig Mod posted an interesting tweet about the nature of software. In response to John Gruber’s assertion that the original version of Markdown doesn’t need a significant amount of work, he said this:

@gruber @waxpancake I think your point about it being ok for software to be "done" is very strong. We need more "done" software.— Craig Mod (@craigmod) September 5, 2014

This gave me pause, because it flies in the face of a very...

This essay originally appeared in the 8/1/2014 issue of The Loop magazine. It’s a publication worth paying for, and it’s run by Jim Dalrymple, a gentleman with a fantastic beard and an even better laugh. Thank you, sir, for giving me an opportunity to write for The Loop!

1.

My favorite story about coffee is from the year 1600, when Pope Clement VIII was the head of the Catholic Church. As the story goes, the Pope’s advisers urged him to make coffee a forbidden drink for Christians. They...

Google’s new sitelinks search box threatens to take your hard won branded traffic and hand it over to competitors unless you implement the specified markup.

Here’s what’s happening and why you need to bump the sitelinks search box markup implementation to the top of your priorities. Sitelinks Search Box



On September 5th Google announced the launch of an improved search box in sitelinks for branded queries.

When users search for a company by name—for example, [Megadodo Publications]...

As I’m sure you’re extremely tired of hearing by now, I recently wrote a book on Product Management. For those of you who are too cheap to buy it (I kid, I kid1), there is now an edited chapter excerpt up on Smashing Magazine. In Why Companies Need Full-Time Product Managers (And What They Do All Day) I give my definition of Product Management, and go into some of the characteristics of a good PM. Also:

The truth is that, to be effective, the role of a manager for a particular product or...