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News

Aug 24
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Is Google’s AMP Worth the Effort?

By News

Today, Digiday posted a piece about the AMP’s dominance over Facebook’s Instant Articles (which isn’t a surprise) give the issues a lot publishers have had with it.

At my current agency, we’ve add AMP to a number of our client websites but have yet to really see a giant jump in their mobile traffic to AMP pages, even with SEO efforts specifically driving to those pages.

It’s actually been a significant amount of effort for minimal return. Even though the pages load a lot faster, I’m not totally sure it’s worth the effort right now.

Mar 26
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Instagram Announces You’ll Soon See “Newer” Posts In Your Feed

By News

I’m surprised that it took Instagram so long to add this option back after all the negative comments they got when they changed it over a year ago.

What users really want is a chronological feed, but today’s announcement is at least an acknowledgement that not everything about the algorithmic timeline is working.

Read the full article over on Wired: Instagram Announces You’ll Soon See “Newer” Posts In Your Feed

Mar 15
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Overcast 4.1 Released

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Marco Arment released Overcast 4.1 in the App Store this week. One of the new features is a game changer.

Smart Resume is actually two features:

1. It jumps back by up to a few seconds after having been paused to help remind you of the conversation.

2. It slightly adjusts resumes and seeks to fall in the silences between spoken words when reasonably possible.

Both are subtle but noticeable benefits (my favorite kind), especially when you’re being interrupted a lot, such as while following turn-by-turn navigation directions.

Smart Resume is on by default, and can be turned off in Nitpicky Details.

John Gruber sums up the feature well: “My favorite type of feature is one that makes you think, “Why did no one think of this years ago?” This is that sort of feature.”

Check out all the of release notes on Marco’s website, then download Overcast to level up your podcasting.

Feb 15
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Facebook is pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app

By News

Onavo’s VPN allow Facebook to monitor user activity across apps, giving Facebook a big advantage in terms of spotting new trends across the larger mobile ecosystem. For example, Facebook gets an early heads up about apps that are becoming breakout hits; it can tell which are seeing slowing user growth; it sees which apps’ new features appear to be resonating with their users, and much more.

This is such a shame. I actually used to use Onavo back in the day when their VPN would actually crunch the size of images to save data on your plan. I heavily use Facebook Ads for clients (and sometimes myself) and this is not a good thing. No company should ever have access to everything a person does online.

Don’t believe me? Check out Gizmodo’s write up on the subject.

Feb 14
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Chrome Ad Filtering Explained

By News

Sites are evaluated by examining a sample of pages from the site. Depending on how many violations of the Better Ads Standards are found, the site will be evaluated as having a status of Passing, Warning, or Failing. The evaluation status of sites can be accessed via the Ad Experience Report API. Site owners can also see more detailed results, such as the specific violations of the Better Ads Standards that were found, via the Ad Experience Report in Google’s Search Console. From the Report site owners can also request that their site be re-reviewed after they have addressed the non-compliant ad experiences.

This is a welcome change. Any web page that automatically plays music, a video with the sound on, or otherwise invades my personal space shouldn’t be on the web, as far as I’m concerned. That being said, I do work in advertising and make money from digital ad placements. I think the digital ad experience should enhance a user’s visit to a website, not take away from it. I’m glad to see Google moving this direction.

Dec 14
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iMac Pro Orders Are Live

By News

The day many, many people have been waiting for is here: the new iMac Pro from Apple is available for order. With a base model of $4,000, it’s no surprise that the configurations escalate quickly. I priced out an ideal setup for myself and here’s what I got:

  • 2.5GHz 14-core Intel Xeon W processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.3GHz
  • 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC memory
  • 4TB SSD
  • Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16GB of HBM2 memory
  • Magic Mouse 2 + Magic Trackpad 2 – Space Gray
  • Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad – US English – Space Gray

All that came down to $10,948.00. Granted I did skip the Final Cut Pro X pre-installed, but I may rethink that now that Apple has added support for VR and HDR video editing.

Dec 07
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Sprout Social Acquires Simply Measured

By News

Because the product is grounded in full-funnel analytics, Simply Measured gives social teams better intelligence to reach the right people, content marketers insight to create more relevant materials and digital agencies opportunities to win new business and foster client loyalty.

Sprout Social is a truly amazing service. So for them to announce this week that they’ve acquired Simply Measured to increase the value of their social analytics couldn’t be a better early Christmas present. It’s also amazing to see that the market is expected to grow to $9.54 billion by 2022.

Source: Sprout Social Acquires Social Analytics Firm Simply Measured

Dec 05
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NASA’s Solar Sytem Things to Know This Week

https://nasa.tumblr.com/post/168197096249/solar-system-things-to-know-this-week