Reading Time: 2 min I’ve said before that I don’t think Facebook is listening to you through your phone, but the truth is perhaps much worse. The amount of detail (and information they can derive from that) is staggering. This crazy technology can be a good thing, too. I’ve thought for years that companies like Apple would find a […]
Google launches “Search Console Insights”, and it’s excellent
Reading Time: < 1 min If you have a website, Google has long offered two great (free!) tools to help you understand the visitors on your site. Google Analytics: Shows you information about the people on your site; how they got there, a bit about them, and what they looked at. Google Search Console: This is the view of your […]
Luxuries get taken for granted
Reading Time: < 1 min I recently finished the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind“, and I’ll likely share a few things from it in the coming weeks. It was an excellent book, and I highly recommend it. Near the end, the author talked a lot about happiness, and how most things generally only make us more (or less) […]
Shifting ideas versus flip-flopping
Reading Time: < 1 min I’ve said for nearly a decade that changing your mind on a topic can be a great thing. This can be little things like the type of phone you prefer, or bigger things like the governmental policies that you support. Locking yourself in and refusing to be open to new ideas is a dangerous place […]
Own your shortcomings
Reading Time: 2 min A few years ago I was car shopping and was looking at perhaps getting a Nissan as my next car. As I researched further, though, I found out that they didn’t yet support Android Auto (which was on the list of features I was looking for). When I Googled for “why doesn’t Nissan support Android […]
There’s room for your own island
Reading Time: < 1 min When people talk about the big companies online (like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc), it’s easy to think that they make up most of the internet. And while they’re indeed massive, they still only take up small chunks of space compared to the entire web. To help visualize this, Martin Vargic created a map of […]
Everyone in the restaurant has a story
Reading Time: < 1 min When you’re at a coffee shop or a restaurant, it’s easy to think of the others in there as simply “extras” in your story — nameless people filling the background of your life. That may be true from your view, but it’s valuable to remember that they all have full lives and stories too. This […]
The fog of war and the future of technology
Reading Time: 2 min I’m thrilled to have lived in the time period that I grew up in. When I was born in 1976, there was essentially no such thing as a “home computer”, much less amazing devices like cell phones, and I’ve been able to watch as technology has grown up with me. When I was young, our […]
It’s not about ranking first, it’s about ranking first for the right keyword
Reading Time: < 1 min Many people make it a goal to rank first in Google, and it’s not a bad plan. The problem is what you’re trying to rank first for. This is a common tactic that spammers use — they can promise you a #1 ranking as long as they don’t promise exactly what you’d be ranking #1 […]
Less is often more
Reading Time: < 1 min One of the brilliant things that Apple does with their products is not overthink the marketing, particularly the packaging. A great example of this was an excellent video produced years ago, showing what Microsoft might do with the incredibly simple iPod packaging: The idea comes back to a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Perfection is […]