1. This is the year I began to rely on voice commands in the same compulsive manner that we all reach for our mobile devices. Try this helpful catalog of over 150 questions and 1,000 variations you can ask Google. My favorite Easter egg: “askew.”
2. Just when you thought it was safe to count on your distributed content strategy, Facebook tweaks the algorithm to favor friends and family over publishers. The pressure to create shareable content just got a lot higher.
3. Social sharing of content gets a lot of attention, but search is still a vital traffic driver. Here are 10 ways Google may be determining the freshness of your site’s content.
4. Be sure you are tracking your audience’s engagement with your desktop and mobile experiences. Chartbeat takes a look at patterns for one publisher, and finds that stories with video on top had more user engagement than on desktop — the users weren’t watching the video, but spending more time reading the content beneath.
5. As brands look to innovate and scale customer engagement chatbots are back in vogue for marketers. The implementations are not quite there, with mixed early experiments, but rapidly evolving AI capabilities hold promise. If you’re feeling adventurous, head to OnSequel.com to build your own free chatbot.

Weekend fun: URLs provide a strong signal whether a link is trustworthy — or a risky click. Now there’s a service (marketing for a VPN, naturally) to make even the most innocuous website seem like a sinister click, e.g.: http://6h2.xyz/necro_fdji_arson-hentai-club_xklz_isis-dark-net_live.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.