Industry News

As I mentioned in our monthly Google webmaster report this morning, it seems like there is an uptick in chatter around a possible Google update kicking off this morning. It is extremely early but I've received emails, tweets and other correspondence of a possible Google update...

Rick Robinson wrote a really interesting article on the huge differences in life expectancy between the wealthiest and poorest areas of a city, and how the move to Smart Cities is trying to combat that. From Death, life, and place in great digital cities:

At the heart of the Smarter Cities movement is the belief that the use of engineering and IT technologies, including social media and information marketplaces, can create more efficient and resilient city systems. Might that idea offer...

Yesterday, Search Engine Watch published a story that was a bit outdated. What they eventually did was redirect the story to an older story which said the same thing.

In short...

Within a week, two articles came out about resisting the urge to add new features quickly after a product is launched. First, Julie Zhuo makes the case for slow, small launches with clear “sunset” criteria in The tax of new, because of the inherent cost of maintaining and improving new features:

The tax that comes with introducing any new feature into your product is high. I cannot stress this enough. Sure, maybe the new feature isn’t hard to build, maybe it only takes a couple days and...

A few weeks ago, we reported that Google busted another link seller network. We didn't know which link seller network it was - until now. Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, tweeted last week that the link network they went after was "TLA linkselling sites...

Last week I wrote about How Do You Uncover Your Spammy Links? There I said, when you want to disavow links or have them removed, using Google Webmaster Tools link report is probably not enough. You probably need to use third party tools as well.

Yesterday I posted The problem with letting algorithms make most of our decisions, discussing how removing all knowledge obstacles can make us less adept at dealing with challenges. As is often the case, within a few hours of posting that I came across two more articles that addresses the same issues. First, from Kyle Baxter’s very interesting essay On the Philosophy of Google Glass:

Page’s idea — that we would be fundamentally better off if we had immediate access to all of humanity’s...

Image source: Knight Rider’s KITT – My finished replica!

Nicholas Carr asks some serious questions about things like self-driving cars and our increased reliance on algorithms for decision-making in Moral code:

As we begin to have computer-controlled cars, robots, and other machines operating autonomously out in the chaotic human world, situations will inevitably arise in which the software has to choose between a set of bad, even horrible, alternatives. How do you program a computer...

I went on a BuzzFeed diet about a month ago, where I stopped following the site and reading the content there. I should have stuck to it, because I wouldn’t be wasting my time now dissecting one of its stupid, pageview-baiting stories. In this one, Pinterest is positioned as a better search engine than Google.

The story runs through 10 examples illustrating how Pinterest “beats” Google “nine out of ten times.” But despite the headline, these aren’t examples of Pinterest being a better search...