David Emery OnlineGoogle Fuses Google+ Into Search
The short version is that Google search results are going to be automatically personalized (to a greater degree than they were already) for each user, with signals drawn from your Google+ Circles being used to highlight things your friends — or you, yourself — have shared. Any of these personalized matches will appear alongside ‘normal’ search results. And Google will also pull in photos shared on Picasa or Google+ (they’ll even show up if you’ve marked them private, but they’ll still only be visible to you).
It seems like there’s an ever growing opportunity for someone to come in and do search much better then Google does it, stripping it back to basics and focusing on the quality of results (which are appalling for so many search types – anything product focused just leads to page upon page of retailer sites, for example).
I think the attempt to (badly) add social features to all of their platforms could be the undoing of Google.
Visit ➔Willis Earl Beal - Evening's Kiss
Taken from the album Acousmatic Sorcery out in 2012 on Hot Charity/XL Recordings.
I love this really quite a lot. Reminds me in a strange way of early White Stripes; obviously not in terms of the music, but in terms of atmosphere.
Visit ➔How does a Pitchfork review affect an album's popularity?
Pitchfork is a popular-as-hell indie music blog. It's got a hipster-snobby reputation and the reviews are best summarised as "When Adjectives Attack," but their recommendations tend to be on the money and I've found a lot of good music thanks to their Best New Music category.
Pitchfork's also got a reputation of being a real tastemaker, anointing new albums & artists to the big leagues. But is this backed up by the data? I decided to find out.
In short: they don’t (although you need more data for a less flippant conclusion). Also: yay for graphs!
Visit ➔Early Results: Social News and the Open Graph
With the Open Graph , publishers can build a new kind of news app that makes it easy for people to discover what their friends are reading, and look back at top articles over time. As part of these features, we've also introduced new settings so people can easily control the experience after they opt-in. Each user decides if he or she wants to install a social news app, chooses the audience of who can see their activity with it, and can make edits to their settings at anytime.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism (a lot of which is pretty spot on) of some of the news publications and their integration with Facebook using the new Open Graph APIs, as typically they hijack links posted by other people to Facebook and funnel them into a custom app, and also auto-share things to the FB ticker.
These criticisms are almost universally directed at Facebook, but as this post shows it’s the publishers that should be getting the flack; yes, potentially Facebook could potentially place more restrictions on what the APIs can do, but almost all of the issues are on the publishers end.
Visit ➔Announcing Little Printer and BERG Cloud
Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.
You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from — it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special.
This is just a little bit magical. There’s something incredibly compelling about a device that takes the modern internet – Foursquare checkins and all – and makes it something physical.
Also, the design and accompanying video are perfect:
Visit ➔The Wired.co.uk Podcast 52
We'll cover the week in Wired news as normal, including stories about the first lab-grown hamburgers, airmiles for cyclists, batteries that charge in 15 minutes, wine bottles made from paper and Mongolia's plan to cool itself with giant blocks of ice.
And we'll also look back at the last year of trends we've covered on the show. Nate, Duncan, Katie and Liv each pick their favourite topic and we bring a whole host of special expert guests onto the show to discuss how those trends will evolve over the next year.
At about 31mins in you can hear me talk a little bit about music apps (and it turns out I don’t at all sound like I think I do).
Visit ➔Responsive Advertising
Recently at Mark Boulton Design, we’ve been working on a redesign of the global visual language for a large sports network. Like many web sites delivering news and editorial content, they rely on advertising for their revenue — either through multiple ad slots on the page, or from video pre-rolls.
Early on in the project, we discussed Responsive Web Design at length. From an editorial and product perspective, it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want their content adapting to a device their reading it on? Who wants to pinch-zoom again and again? From a business and product perspective, we’ve seen this from multiple clients who want to take advantage of certain interactions on certain devices — swiping for example — for users to better engage with the content in a more native way. All good. And then advertising comes along and things get challenging.
Really great post on the pitfalls of integrating advertising in responsive sites. Seems like this could well take a lot of time to fix properly – most sites just don’t have the leverage with their advertising provider to be able to shift their advertising around.
Visit ➔