Industry News

‘Tis the time for introspection, and this year we all seem to wonder about the future of online publishing — and in particular, what role the personal blog will play going forward. Jason Kottke kicks us off with The blog is dead, long live the blog:

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and...

The VCSO team did a great interview with designer and illustrator Kyle Steed about his recent trip to Israel. I love Kyle’s view that what makes VSCO Cam great is all the ways it’s decidedly not Instagram:

It’s like this, you can’t just slap a b&w filter on a crappy photograph and suddenly it’s Ansel Adams, that’s foolish thinking. But this is where the majority lives I believe, in this make believe world that if they add enough filters and effects to their photo, then they’ll make the...

So Google confirmed they reduced the authorship snippets from showing in the results. We know that. Matt Cutts strongly implied that there was no update on December 17th...

Back in May, we covered how Google is planning on releasing an algorithm to promote subject authorities in the search results. Some call this the "good guy algorithm" and some call it the "author authority algorithm," while others may have some other names for it...

Khoi Vinh wrote a great essay exploring What Streaming Music Can Be. He starts by describing some of the things that made buying CDs and albums a meaningful experience:

This is all trivia, to be sure, but it’s the kind of stuff that used to be such a meaningful part of owning music — and that makes one a fan for life. Having a record in your collection meant that you could spend time poring over its liner notes: familiarizing yourself with the names of musicians, producers, engineers, and...

I am not sure if you noticed but all the Google search results tracking tools flared up yesterday reporting major changes in the Google search results. You can see for yourself at MozCast, SERPs.com...

In October, Matt Cutts of Google at PubCon announced there would likely be a 15% reduction in authorship being displayed in the Google search results. Since then, I haven't seen many - I've seen some - complaints about authorship going away...

I’m guilty of giving some bad, incomplete advice.

I talk a lot about how to engage with influencers and how to earn the attention and awarenes of folks who might help you amplify your messages to a larger audience. It’s a good tactic and I stand by it. If you’re trying to reach people, building connections with the folks who might influence them is smart. But, building connections means more than just normal levels of interaction. It means earning their interest – and because they’re...

Kontra explores a particularly egregious style of “content marketing”-style advertising on CNN’s website in his post “You Might Also Like”. He concludes:

Will these advertorial deceptions and misdirections move from the ad wells around the periphery of the page into the news delivery itself? Will there be product placements within news sentences? What follows that? Is the “mainstream media” management about to capitulate on long-held principles because it’s unable or unwilling to pursue...