Industry News

If you visit your Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report, you will see an "update" line across the graph. When you place your cursor over the update, it reads...

Craig Mod’s Goodbye, Cameras kicked off an interesting discussion on the future of photography and connected devices:

As I’ve become a more network-focussed photographer, I’ve come to love using the smartphone as an editing surface; touch is perfect for photo manipulation. There’s a tactility that is lost when you edit with a mouse on a desktop computer. Perhaps touch feels natural because it’s a return to the chemical-filled days of manually poking and massaging liquid and paper to form...

You know the search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools? Of course you do...

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? 

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