From the release of the page experience algorithm, there is no longer any preferential treatment for AMP in Google’s search results, Top Stories carousel and the Google News.
Hooray!
Given Google’s history of killing Reader in a possible attempt to help empower their G+ product, does anyone else see their getting rid of email subscriptions from FeedBurner as a play at an upcoming Newsletter service/app/feature?
It’s suspicious that in a time with increased interest in paid Newsletters, they’d be giving this sort of love to an old project.
Context from a recent Google email:
FeedBurner has been a part of Google for almost 14 years, and we’re making several upcoming changes to support the product’s next chapter. Here’s what you can expect to change and what you can do now to ensure you’re prepared.
Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time.
For those who use FeedBurner email subscriptions, we recommend downloading your email subscribers so that you can migrate to a new email subscription service.
For many users, no action is required. All existing feeds will continue to serve uninterrupted, and you can continue to create new accounts and burn new feeds. Core feed management functionality will continue to be supported, such as the ability to change the URL, source feed, title, and podcast metadata of your feed, along with basic analytics.
I take it you didn’t try the Sherman phrase “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”
It took a bit of moving data, extensions, and other details over, but I’ve now made the switch to Firefox as my default browser. Sweeping Chrome into the dustbin.
Two weeks after her forced exit, the AI ethics researcher reflects on her time at Google and the state of the AI field.
It’s long past time to divest my personal data from Google. Reading this article on holiday reminds me that I’ve got time to start making the necessary changes.
World Wide Web Consortium urged to get its governance act together
Earlier this week, 20 web advertising companies wrote to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Advisory Board to ask that the standards organization revise its governance process to prevent ad tech giants like Google from running roughshod over the concerns of others with an interest in the web.
Kevin Marks literally and figuratively highlighted a bit of interesting found poetry on Google’s Ten things we know to be true article. (Click the link to see the highlight poetry on Google’s page for yourself.)
A screenshot appears below:
Found poetry:
“Doing evil
is a business
take advantage of
all our users”
Here’s a shortened URL for it that you can share with others: bit.ly/D-ntB-Evil
It’s a creative inverse of blackout poetry where instead of blacking out extraneous words, one can just highlight them instead. This comes courtesy of some new browser based functionality that Google announced earlier this week relating to some of their search and page snippets functionality.
It doesn’t seem to be available everywhere just yet.
SearchEngineLand notes that this could have an impact on the ad market, since a website’s visitors may be automatically scrolled down past its ads to the relevant content. The publication notes that sites may need to change the location of their ads in light of Google’s latest feature. ❧
And of course there will be crazy implications for the adtech space.
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:30AM
Clicking the snippet still takes you to the webpage that it pulled the information from, but now the text from the snippet will be highlighted in yellow, and the browser will automatically scroll down to the section in question. ❧
This is a feature that’s been implemented in most browsers for a while as fragmentions.
Hypothes.is has supported this sort of functionality for a few years now as well.
I’m curious how these different implementations differ?
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:36AM
and started testing the functionality on HTML pages last year ❧
The data below shows some of the misspellings detected by our spelling correction system for the query [ britney spears ], and the count of how many different users spelled her name that way. Each of these variations was entered by at least two different unique users within a three month period, and was corrected to [ britney spears ] by our spelling correction system (data for the correctly spelled query is shown for comparison).
There’s potentially some interesting corpus linguistics implied in some of this data.
I've had a fascination with maps for as long as I can remember. During family road trips to San Francisco I remember tracing our route on a map with a highlighter in real-time. Many, many years later, I am able to trace my route automatically with a GPS receiver on my phone.
https://aaronparecki.com...
Aaron has really done some awesome map related work with his GPS tracking. Looking at just his personal map data for a year or two will give you an idea about how much other corporations can gain from tracking millions of people this way.
Looking at some of the map pins like for Target on his map will tell you that Google could potentially be using aggregate data about visits to companies as a way of knowing how well or poorly a company is doing and then using that data to make bets for or against companies in the stock market. This could give them the ability to front run investments if they wanted to.
Manton and Daniel celebrate episode 400 by inviting Oisín Prendiville to join them for a conversation ranging from Oisín’s podcasting app Castro and the virtues of selling it to Tiny, to the state of the podcasting industry, to a story of bicycle theft and recovery.
Discovery feature: Podcast Shuffle – Manton’s 2005 blog post announcing a hack for listening to a random podcast episode. (Sadly this link seems to be gone from the web and isn’t on archive.org.)
–Originally bookmarked December 21, 2019 at 10:51AM
Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna)
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)