Industry News

Mark O’Connell wrote a very interesting article about a fairly unsettling iOS app called Days of Life — “a counter for the days you have left to live.” In Deathwatch he explores just how weird and absurd this app turns out to be:

Days of Life is one of those technologies that seems to incidentally satirize our relationship with technology more broadly. It sits in the “Productivity” folder on my iPhone’s home screen, along with my calendar and a to-do list app called Remember the Milk, but...

Over Christmas, Rap Genius was penalized by Google for unnatural links. In short, they offered an exchange of traffic for keyword rich links to their site. It was outed, Google's Matt Cutts saw it, it lead to a manual action that had a serious impact on their traffic.
It lasted a total of ten-days and now Rap Genius is back in the search results...

Alexis Madrigal — who is turning into one of the most interesting journalists of our time — goes deep on Netflix’s 76,897 (often bizarre) micro-genres in How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood:

Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented.

Netflix is putting in a staggering amount of effort on the structured data of their TV shows and movies. And of...

Lyrics site Rap Genius says that is is no longer penalized within Google after taking action to correct “unnatural links” that it helped create. The site was hit with a penalty for 10 days, which meant people seeking it by name couldn’t find it. That’s been fixed, though it’s unclear how much traffic the site will regain for generic lyrics searches. Rap Genius Back By Name In Google

After the penalty, people couldn’t find Rap Genius when searching for it on Google by name. Now, searches for...

A WebmasterWorld thread has a webmaster who asked if Google will give him a boost because one piece of his content on his site hit over 1,000 Facebook likes.
It is one of those weird questions that makes you nod your head sideways. Why?

Megan Garber takes on Instagram Direct1 in Behold, Facetwitterest: The Standardized Future of Social, and makes this observation:

So one of the biggest challenges facing the major (and the trying-to-be-major) social networks is a structural one: How do you build yourself up and out in ways that balance users’ desire for intimacy with their desire for publicity? How do you merge the web’s ability to create communities with its ability to create universalities? 

You could read...

Small human beings learn by mimicking and so they learn patience by mimicking patience. Perhaps this means that a larger human being somewhere many thousands of generations back took a long and patient breath as the smaller human being in his or her arms squirmed. Perhaps the smaller human being saw this long and patient breath and internalized it and began to understand. Perhaps all of the patience in the world is a copy of one sigh.

— Paul Ford, What I’ve learned from fatherhood...

We know Google doesn't like it when you submit a new reconsideration request a day or two after you get a rejection response from your reconsideration request. They want to see you put effort in after you get that response...