Industry News

Mitch Lasky wrote a very interesting analysis of the gaming industry’s move from packaged goods to digital goods. From EA and the Future:

In my experience, the incumbent packaged goods companies clearly see mobile, digital distribution and free-to-play models as inevitable. They know what’s coming and have known for some time. But within the senior management ranks of these companies there is still a lingering perception that digital doesn’t, in their words, “move the needle”...

In How the internet is making us poor Christopher Mims asks a chilling question about what he calls the “hollowing out of the middle class” — the phenomenon where knowledge workers are being replaced by computers:

Like farming and factory work before it, the labors of the mind are being colonized by devices and systems. In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now...

I originally wrote the following article 6 years ago, and it was published on Search Engine Land on February 9th, 2007. At the time, I wasn’t sure if we would ever see Google find a way to meld together ranking signals from PageRank and Information Retrieval with relevance signals from authors and publishers and commentators [...]

The post Google’s Agent Rank / Author Rank Patent Filing appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

News publications having “sponsored content “deals are on the rise, and Google’s apparently concerned enough that it’s issued a warning today that publishers should keep such content out of Google News.

In a post today on the Google News blog, the company writes: If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it...

Last month, an excerpt from Eric Schmidt’s forthcoming book came out where he discussed how identity and authorship might be used to better rank search results. Since then, I’ve seen that widely cited as proof Google is already doing “Author Rank.” It’s not, nor was Schmidt describing a Google-specific system. But that could come, and Google’s existing authorship program may be a part of it. Schmidt On Potential Future Of Profiles & Ranking

The excerpt came from the Wall Street Journal,...

I've known Dianna Huff since at least 2007, but she's been helping B2B companies get their websites in good order since 1998. From the best way to market your content via mobile devices to how to write content that appeals to a B2B target audience, Dianna has got it nailed down.

Our beloved industry is pretty wary of buzz words. And by “our industry” I mean User Experience Designers — although we can’t even agree on what to call ourselves, so that’s another problem, I guess. Anyway. Debates over terms like skeuomorphism, flat design, and “No UI” have given us a strong skepticism for fancy words. That’s mostly refreshing, but it can also be a handicap if we end up dismissing valuable ideas because we don’t like the terms that describe those ideas.

I would argue that...

Willa Paskin wrote a really interesting article for Wired about the future of television. The most interesting parts of Netflix Resurrected Arrested Development. Next Up: Television Itself are about the rise of “binge-watching” — the behavior of churning through multiple episodes at a time in one sitting. Netflix found that designing shows to allow for binge-watching is good business:

The more that ­people binge-watch, the more attached they become to the show. “Binge-watching is a...