Industry News

Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island, a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And Google's fingerprints are all over it.

It's unclear what's inside the structure, which stands about four stories high and was made with a series of modern cargo containers. The same goes for when it will be unveiled, but the big tease has already begun. Locals refer to it as the secret project.

The importance of research and participatory design appears to be kind of a theme on the site this week. I just keep running into articles like Sven Torfinn’s How teachers in Africa are failed by mobile learning. He discusses how leaving teachers out of the design process is a big risk:

My concern is that some people use the problems with education systems to justify excluding teachers from the design and development of mobile learning interventions. Teachers’ voices are marginalised. And...

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When I started out this blog over 6 years ago I said what nowadays is almost a running gag: "SEO is dead". So you could assume I am the most unlikely person to tell you that SEO is alive. Take a look at the context of my attention grabbing claim back then: I introduced a new kind of SEO, a better one.

For lack of any better term I referred to the new school of SEO simply as SEO 2.0

My blog is still called SEO 2.0 despite the "2.0" hype being long gone and most things "2.0" being...

One of the highlights of the year for me is Matt Cutts talk at PubCon. So me not being there, being 6,000+ miles away, was unfortunate. It was the first PubCon I've missed in, well, I can't remember...

About a year ago Chris Dixon wrote a great post called Some problems are so hard they need to be solved piece by piece. It was based on an old Andrew Parker post The Spawn of craigslist about how Craigslist is getting beaten not by another similar company, but by niche startups going after their business piece by piece. Chris writes:

Startups that have tried to go head-to-head against the entirety of Craigslist (the “horizontal approach”) have struggled. Startups that have tried to go up...

@SynrgyHQ posted an image of a search result that I felt was a joke, it couldn't be real. I immediately emailed Google and they confirmed within ten minutes that this as a small test they are running in the United States...

We already knew Google wasn’t likely to update the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar this year. The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, reiterated today that this will stay the case and explained why. Google’s ability to update the toolbar is broken, and it’s not a priority to fix it.

Speaking at Pubcon today, Cutts explained that the “pipeline” to send PageRank updates to the toolbar is broken. Google, feeling that too many people obsess over PageRank, doesn’t see it as important...

Getting feedback is an essential component of good design. No matter how smart we are, we are going to get too invested in our solutions, and we need the help of knowledgeable outsiders to nudge us in the right direction. The problem is that feedback sessions can get out of hand quickly, because we’re just not very good at providing (or receiving) feedback. We are prone to seeing the negative parts of someone’s ideas first, so we often jump straight into the teardown. This puts the person who...

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