For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014. Google is once again showing tweets in …
Friday 5 — 2.13.2015
With the rise of sideways traffic via search and social, the homepage of a news site isn’t the single navigational portal it once was. Still, it’s an important brand asset, and defines organizing principles for content. Here are 64 ways to think about a news home page. Balancing being informed with staying productive isn’t easy. It requires effort …
What Google knows to show you
Google has come a long way from the user experience of “ten blue links.” Today, Google pulls in a vast amount of the information it searches, has a keener understanding of what you are looking for — and serves it up to you directly. Google’s organization of the world’s data, called ‘The Knowledge Graph,’ affects about 25% of …
Friday 5 — 11.21.2014
Google is now clearly identifying mobile-friendly sites in its search results. While Google’s search algorithm remains a well-kept secret, it’s not a stretch to infer that sites that perform well on mobile will index better for its search. Wasting time on Facebook at work is a popular pastime, even if you have to access it stealthily on …
Friday 5 — 10.31.2014
Benedict Evans demonstrates how mobile is eating the world. It’s worth reading for the astonishing growth metrics, like 80% of all adults in the world owning smartphones by 2020. One larger point is that tech is rapidly moving beyond the tech sector to transform all industries. And for now, that starts mobile first. Product managers are critical in the …
Friday 5 — 10.10.2014
Google has enhanced its search results with an “In the News” box. These results include blogs and other content sites that are not traditionally indexed as news. This would explain the travesty above, where a Chelsea blog is listed related to a search for Arsenal F.C. Here’s a thoughtful recap and lessons learned from the NYTNow …
Friday 5 — 9.26.2014
Even with the meteoric rise of social media, search remains a significant driver of traffic for most sites. Google released a helpful, scrolling infographic reviewing the basics of how search works. Visual social network Pinterest is a treasure trove for publishers. Not only a resource for trendspotting, Pinterest can in some cases drive more referral traffic …
Next gen mobile: your app data finds you
The news industry is still struggling with the shift to digital, as the leaked New York Times innovation report underscores. Apart from new required competencies like video, data visualization, and analytics that digital transformation demands, there is a similar tectonic shift in reader (user) expectation. News has gone from being a canonical resource that people …