mardi 30 juin 2015
Bing Replaces Google on AOL, Microsoft Passes Majority of Ad Sales To AOL
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dimanche 28 juin 2015
Google Hotwording, Chrome Audio Spy Payload Removed
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vendredi 26 juin 2015
Google Addresses Accidental Mobile Clicks
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jeudi 25 juin 2015
Yahoo and Oracle in Partnership for Java Updates to Include Making Yahoo Default
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ICANN Proposal To Reveal Persons Identity When Whois is Registration is Private
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mercredi 24 juin 2015
Facebook's New Authorship Tag for Journalists and Bloggers
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Today's FREE and BEST Business Model
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mardi 23 juin 2015
Facebook's Experimental Algo For Facial Recognition Gets Smarter
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June 17 Google Algorithm Changes: "News-Wave Update"
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lundi 22 juin 2015
Google Announces "News Lab" For Journalists and Entrepreneurs
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vendredi 19 juin 2015
Core Google Algorithm Change, not Panda = Everflux as Usual!
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jeudi 18 juin 2015
Google Trends Major Refresh - Now Shows Search,YouTube and Google News
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mardi 16 juin 2015
LastPass Hacked: Time to change your master password
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lundi 15 juin 2015
Bing Moving to Encrypt Search Traffic by Default
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Keyword Density Calculation
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samedi 13 juin 2015
France Gives Google 15-Days To Comply With "Right to be Forgotten," Globally
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vendredi 12 juin 2015
This week's sponsor: Hack Reactor
Time to learn JavaScript? This week’s sponsor, Hack Reactor, offers a 12-week, immersive coding program. Check ’em out!
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Twitter's CEO, Dick Costolo, Steps Down
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Learning New Tricks
At the beginning of this year, I switched my full-time focus in a pretty sizable way. I jumped from an environment where I had at least a bit of expertise and its associated advantages, into one where I had little to no foothold.
Switching roles usually means adjusting to a new environment, new coworkers, and new problems to solve—things you might work through in a matter of weeks. But there I was, two, then three months in, and still feeling unadjusted.
What I hadn’t realized was that jumping into a completely different side of the industry is disorienting. The new environment was similar enough to the old one that it still triggered my muscle memory, which was largely irrelevant for new tasks. There were only a few skills I could rely on during the transition—the basic workflow, programming principles, and methods of collaboration and feedback were all the same, but that didn’t always help with things like deploying applications to devices natively, or making decisions about how best to implement a platform-specific SDK.
One of the biggest advantages of having expertise is understanding and implementing best practices, but they were often the biggest hindrance in learning something new. Applying best practices to a new area of focus from a related-yet-foreign area of expertise was destructive.
This was most noticeable in the software architecture decisions I faced. Coming from the world of programming on the web, both server and client side, my mind defaulted to certain patterns of communication between pieces of an application—specifically notifications and callbacks. When sketching out a plan for a feature build, I would sometimes forget about the delegate pattern, which is a pretty heavily-relied upon pattern in Cocoa. In a lot of cases, that was the best fit for the feature in front of me, but my mind was trained otherwise.
The other reason knowing best practices was destructive when learning something new: I was constantly focused on making sure what I built adhered to those patterns. That forced me to focus on optimizing a system before I’d even built or understood it. I was prematurely applying structure to something that I wasn’t quite sure even worked yet.
I had to get back into beginner mode: make whatever it was I was building actually work, before deliberating on how it should be built. It sounds like an obvious thing, but it takes concentration to restrain yourself like that. The sad irony here is that I should’ve known this from the start. A few months ago I wrote about relying on intelligence rather than knowledge, and that’s how we should operate when learning new skills.
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Long Tail Keywords: The SEO Opportunity
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jeudi 11 juin 2015
Report: New Apple Safari To Feature Ad Blocking Option
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Google Location Aware Search is Live
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Twitter Rolls Out Block List Sharing for Privacy and Safety
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mercredi 10 juin 2015
Google Shopping Feed Specification and Product Taxonomy Updated
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Apple Sending Vehicles To Photograph Streets in UK and Ireland
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Twitter Now Makes Conversations Easier To Follow
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mardi 9 juin 2015
This week's sponsor: O’Reilly
Thanks to O’Reilly for sponsoring ALA this week! Learn about what’s at the intersection of the internet of things, design, and business at Solid Conference, June 23-25.
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Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2015
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lundi 8 juin 2015
Content Modeling Phases
Most of my projects involve building content models, and I have a deep and abiding love for the process. I like teasing out the patterns and relationships in a big mess of content, then creating a structure that marries development, design, and business needs. I find it very satisfying, like putting together perfect rows in Tetris.
I’ve worked on plenty of projects that have issues that warrant the creation of a content model: a client wants more efficient governance workflows, or to reuse pieces of content across channels, or they’re building a responsive site and need a cleaner separation of content and display code. They’ve learned, or been told, that the answer to the mess they’re in lies in a content model. The problem is that a content model isn’t actually an end game. It’s not a solution unto itself.
A content model is an organizational tool. Expecting it to solve problems merely by existing is a bit like setting up a new filing cabinet in your office and being surprised when you come back a week later to a desk still covered in piles of receipts.
My projects run more smoothly when my stakeholders understand the bigger picture of what’s involved in converting to a new content model, and I’ve started to talk about content modeling as having four phases:
1. Auditing existing content and building the initial models
This is what most of us picture when we think of content modeling. A structural audit is how I learn the shapes and patterns in the content, and I translate that understanding into diagrams and spreadsheets detailing content sections, fields, and relationships.
2. Stress-testing the models
I do two kinds of stress-testing, and both are kind of tedious and extremely important. The first kind involves literally sitting around a table with subject matter experts—representing the needs of the content, business, development, and design teams—and walking through each model. Field by field, section by section, we discuss issues and adjust the model to better meet everyone’s needs. It’s a little arduous, and absolutely necessary. Bring snacks.
The second kind of stress-testing is a sample migration of roughly 10 percent of existing content to fit in the new models. The models are built based on a representative subset of real content, but a broader migration pilot project always reveals new issues that need to be addressed. A pilot migration also gives us solid statistics we can use to estimate time and energy needs for the full migration.
In a recent project, we had assumed we’d be able to glean the content of a teaser field from the current site, but through the migration test we recognized the need for a copywriter to rewrite most of that information. That same migration pilot also helped us identify which sections could be migrated quickly by any team member, and which sections needed slow, careful attention from a subject matter expert.
I think it’s important that this migration pilot is conducted by the team who will be creating and editing content moving forward. This gives them a head start in building their own intrinsic understanding of the content structure, and their insights about places the structure is falling short or is overbuilt are invaluable.
3. CMS implementation
I generally build CMS-agnostic models, meaning that I create fields and relationships in service of the content, without regard to how difficult those choices will be to implement in any particular CMS. Bully for me, but once a CMS is chosen, we’re all boarding the express train to Compromise City. During this phase I work closely with developers to make adjustments so the models can still do their jobs within the confines of the CMS’s capabilities.
This phase also involves building customized help and content guidelines directly into the CMS interface, because that is my jam.
4. Getting the content into the CMS
This is dirty secret of content modeling: someone actually has to move all the content from those dusty receipt piles into its new tidy home in the filing system. There are some nifty advances being made around extracting data using algorithms, but for now this work needs to be done by people. Given my druthers, I like to have the team move existing content directly into the models in the new CMS, which familiarizes the team with the new interface and helps us find places we could improve the authoring experience on their behalf.
Having the team move old content directly into the new CMS is not always a realistic plan, because of scheduling and timing, and other complexities. So often we do half-measures, having the team move content into spreadsheets and then auto-importing those to the CMS, or hiring interns to do the bulk of the migration labor. This phase can take a long time, but content migration is a really great way for everyone to get familiar with the CMS administration and workflows long before launch.
5. Shampoo, rinse, repeat
I lied. I said “four phases,” but after those four are complete, the final, endless phase is maintenance, iteration, and improvement. In the same way we promote doing regular content, performance, and code audits, we should also work with our teams to do regular content model audits, reviewing the fields and relationships to make sure they’re still aligned with design, development, and business needs.
I would love to be able to sketch out a content model, quietly close my laptop, and come back the next morning to find all the content humming along in a new and beautifully flexible CMS implementation. For the record, I would also like a mini-donk. Even without magical content gnomes (or tiny equines), recognizing the distinct phases of modeling work has helped my projects run more smoothly. I’m better at getting the right people at the table for the right discussions, and budgeting appropriate energy and time across the entire project. Talking about the phases also helps my stakeholders understand the larger picture of a long-haul content modeling initiative, and helps all of us make decisions that move us closer to meeting our business and content goals.
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vendredi 5 juin 2015
Firefox Adds Pocket, Webmasters Voice Copyright Conerns
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Yahoo announces plans to kill off several services
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jeudi 4 juin 2015
Google Panda Refresh Expected in 2 - 4 Weeks
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mercredi 3 juin 2015
Pinterest Buyable Pins Coming to US
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mardi 2 juin 2015
Resetting Agency Culture
The internet is full of stories of “dream” agency environments: Google’s “sleep pods,” Yelp’s KegMate, this place’s air hockey table, that joint’s Zen rock garden. They read well in viral articles intended to induce cognitive salivation—the 3 p.m. cubicle fatigue equivalent of a SkyMall Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue while flying coach.
But the truth is this: there’s so much more to fostering investment and growth in our team members than gimmicky perks. A true dream office, then, is one that invests deeply in the success of its employees.
While “investment” is often contextualized via finance-centric terminology, the way it anchors a healthy agency culture cannot be trivialized. Agency culture is the result of many factors and influences, but a healthy environment is one that encourages team members to speak up; that fosters inspiration through collective brainstorming and problem-solving; that doesn’t micro-analyze the way time is spent; and that enables employees to listen to and learn from one another.
Sadly, many agencies support a model that’s more about draining workers of every available bit of brainpower. A team member is hired to work and contribute, clearly, but not at the expense of being devalued or dehumanized. Employees are not the equivalent of a dust-bunny-gobbling Roomba, careening from point A to point B with little to no direction. Thoughtful changes in approach—from the way people are brought into the team, to the approach to creativity and communication, to the support for professional development—can make a big difference in employees’ happiness and dedication.
The new Day One
With new hires, many agencies operate under the “jump right into it” methodology; I’m sure most of us have experienced this at some point in our own careers. On Monday, we commute into the new office, are greeted by a terse “Welcome” and a handshake, then get seated at a workstation and immediately lobbed into a project. But by then, the grandest of opportunities toward employee investment—acclimating them as a human rather than as a “worker”—has already been lost.
To prevent that, I’ve created a different kind of onboarding experience at my agency, Nansen. We begin Day One on a Friday, and use the following process for new design hires (though with some adjustments, the experience can apply to any role):
Acclimation
The first half of the day is setup: coworker meet-and-greets, personalizing and configuring their laptop for their own level of comfort, and working with the appropriate team members to secure licenses and install the tools they need.
Conversation
The day in the office proper effectively ends around noon. Over an off-site lunch, there’s conversation: on design, on creative inspiration, on how our team functions within the organization, on current and future projects. The clock isn’t watched, judgy gazes aren’t cast, and implications of seniority or hierarchy are left off the table. Taking a team member out to lunch on their first day isn’t rocket science; how they’re engaged (constructive dialogue versus cell phone tunnel vision) is where we see the most value.
Inspiration
With questions answered, there’s only one expectation for the day: we make a visit to anywhere in the city that inspires the designer. While the role is contextualized by digital endeavors, inspiration has no such limitations. For some, it might take the form of Chicago architecture; for others, a museum’s collection. Understanding what has influenced them creatively, then, provides insight into their approach to visual communication that exceeds what folio work can yield.
Reflection
By this point, a first day of copious amounts of healthy discussion (and coffee, and walking) has served to establish a tone of humanized dialogue. By the business clock there’s typically not much time remaining; as such, the remainder of the day and weekend can be taken for thought and reflection on what was, very likely, a first day unlike any other previously experienced.
Monday, then, remains the day to begin client and project understanding and familiarity. Now serving as Day Two, it has been prefaced by a tangible and immersive demonstration of how their thoughts and voice are valued, and how the creative team functions. While some of the day can be adjusted or tweaked per the role being filled, this process demonstrates our agency culture and fosters mutual respect and appreciation.
A healthy dynamic
It’s staggering how much relationship dynamics can, and will, undermine your team members’ collective confidence. Lack of constructive mentorship and supportive guidance, or leaders who elevate themselves above those whose skillsets they should be cultivating—these things are as poisonous as open hostility.
In a junior role I occupied eons ago, the culture was openly hostile toward mistakes and subjective failure. Whenever I was given the opportunity to present my work to a client, leadership’s attitude was one of baited anticipation toward mistakes I might make (perceived or factual), combined with self-preservation of ego. After wrapping things up, I knew it was a toss-up as to whether management would simply leave the room without event (best case scenario), or if I’d get pulled into any of a handful of Herman Miller-furnished offices for denigration. This type of “leadership” behavior induces anxiety, inhibits confidence, and is tantamount to psychological abuse. No amount of employee compensation validates flaunting your own insecurity.
In contrast, presenting work should always be an opportunity for employees to thrive and succeed. To that end, preceding any client-facing walkthrough of a project, I give my team some initial thoughts on what we should be covering—“Don’t assume the client knows what we know: why we did what we did and what the benefit is to the user and to the project’s goals”—and I clarify our presentation roles—“I’ll set the presentation up, and should I chime in during your walk-through, it’s to supplement your dialogue.”
If your team member is junior and hasn’t presented their work before, give them the chance per their level of comfort. It can start small. On completion, have an open conversation without any implication of retribution. Dialogue is formed by feedback, not belittlement and threats. The ultimate goal is exposing them to the process, and giving them the (well-supported) chance.
Providing and fostering an environment for open creativity and dialogue is valuable beyond measure. Value conversation over oration, collaboration over delegation.
In practice, a step further
One of the career development and employee investment perks we offer at my agency is sending our team members to a conference of their choice, anywhere in the US, all expenses paid. This is formally qualified on paper as: “Learn, contribute, and network at conferences of your choosing.”
The one stipulation is that, upon their return, the attendee presents to the agency what they got out of the opportunity, and the (potential) worth to other team members in attending next year. Not a bad deal, right? By and large, it’s a strong demonstration that we see employees as much more than pure instruments of client project execution; it shows that we want our team members to grow and evolve. That said, it could be taken further.
At Nansen a couple of years ago, we started a program called Wintercamp, with the goal of fostering active (over passive) learning. Everyone in our agency—all roles from our global locations—centralizes at a retreat in rural Sweden to create something together. We develop tools we can use in our daily process once back on home turf. We participate in open collaboration and non-adversarial discussion. We put faces to names of people only previously known from an email chain. Our titles are irrelevant; the teams we form, flat and collegial.
When participants aren’t focused on work, they cook for one another, have endless discussions about their mutual craft(s), and enjoy the surrounding expansive grounds and leisure activities. At the end of each day, the various project teams present to each other what they’ve accomplished, what the pitfalls were, and solicit open and honest feedback.
People return to their home offices recharged. Invigorated and inspired by their global coworkers, they can act as living embodiments of our culture and brand. The projects worked on at Wintercamp continue as formal entities once we’re back at our desks, which helps keep the momentum going. And teams function more effectively, having worked toward common goals and made deeper personal connections.
To those who sign the checks, the grand total per person equals around a third of the cost of the standard “conference offering.” And we’re by no means the first, nor the only, team to do something like this; numerous agency retreats and “hackathons” already exist. Clearleft’s Hack Farm was very much the model by which we structured Wintercamp. Twitter’s quarterly internal Hack Week has yielded everything from practical functionality like the ability to archive your own tweets to the more fanciful open-source photo-tweeting birdhouse. Many organizations have seen the value of these types of internal retreats; the wins, they are aplenty.
Let’s reset
For many agencies, what I’m advocating represents a shift in thinking, a shift in process, a shift in how we track and value employees’ time. But we’ve made similar shifts before—like when we had to begin advocating for the user at the discovery level, bringing UX into the forefront of our approaches. Today, it’s exceedingly evident that time spent on UX is vital for a digital project’s livelihood; we need to apply that same reevaluation to time spent on employee success.
Whether this serves as procedural affirmation or a wake-up call, team member advocacy is our obligation. If you’re in agency leadership and read this with head nods and all-knowing winks, the highest of fives to you, sir or madam. Conversely, if this all seems unfamiliar, even better—you have an opportunity to create a better environment, one that doesn’t use “being the last to leave the office” as your main metric of employee dedication (the norm in far too many agencies).
To those currently in unhealthy, unsupportive, unengaging cultures: that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach come Sunday evening as the work week looms large needn’t be the norm. When the passion toward your craft isn’t fostered and equalled by your agency’s leaders, your options are self-evident: an open and honest discussion with the cultural stakeholder(s), or liberating yourself from your current role.
If you’re looking toward new opportunities, taking the pulse of a potential new employer’s culture is a paramount step. Pay attention to a few key things:
- What kind of story are they telling? Agency sites that tell a story are all the rage. Quite often, the result can reveal internal culture. For example, what’s the focus of their full-screen background video? Most importantly, what gut feeling does it give you?
- What can you spot in the space? We all exercise hyper self-awareness during an interview. Was that handshake too hard? Am I speaking slowly enough? Do I have salad in my teeth? Once in the space of an agency you’re interested in, however, give awareness to your surroundings as well. A day in the life of that agency is effectively unfolding before your eyes, their culture revealing itself plainly and openly.
Whether in a leadership role as the cultural advocate, or as a passionate and dedicated member of the team, we can agree: a happy and well-supported employee is a fueled, charged, inspired worker. Quality of work is elevated, quality of life is strengthened, and the agency’s brand becomes organically championed by the very people it supports. Our team members truly—no matter the size of the agency, the industry focus, or the specific role—deserve nothing less.
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lundi 1 juin 2015
Facebook can now send you PGP encrypted notiofications
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This week's sponsor: MailChimp
Thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring A List Apart this week! MailChimp offers powerful features like a drag-and-drop email designer, A/B testing, and marketing automation. Try it today.
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Picturefill Me In
If you started reading this hoping that I might bring more references to the excellence of Craig David’s early ’00s jams, the title is really the best I’ve got.
Sorry.
I’ll cut right to the chase: update your copy of Picturefill. npm update—save picturefill (or whatever the equivalent thing to do is in the way you’re managing your libraries). Go ahead and do that. Make sure you’re up on the newest in Picturefill hotness (2.3.1 as of when I was writing this). It’s important.
How important?
Older versions of Picturefill can net you broken images in both Microsoft Edge and Webkit Nightly. There’s already an issue logged for the problem.
You may be sitting here thinking, “OK, Jeff. So what’s the big deal? Some people have some broken images on their sites—they’ll get up to fixing them at some point” and this is where I tell you the deeper problem. Let’s say you’re Microsoft and you’re working on your new awesome browser that people are getting excited about. It’s got support for some of the latest and greatest web technologies. Now, let’s say your new browser is rolling out support for responsive images and it just so happens that a polyfill that’s on thousands of websites, including quite a few that get a lot of traffic cough espn.com cough, throws an error in your browser that makes it so images don’t show.
That’s a straight-up, first-class bad experience. You can’t have that. So, you remove the feature in your browser that collides with the error in Picturefill. Then, all it takes is another browser doing the same thing and all of us out here hoping this spec lands are worried that the functionality will get scrapped all together.
You see why we’re all worried now?
The good news is that you can help! We need this bug to hit the fewest number of people possible. Let’s get the sites out there using earlier versions of Picturefill upgraded. Upgrade your own. Let your people know about the need to upgrade. Evangelize this biz like you were born to do it (OK, I lied, there’s another Craig David reference after all).
For more information, check out Mat Marquis’ post on CSS-Tricks.
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Monitoring Bounce Rate from Google Serps
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