Newscology March 6, 2014

Googcology

Put that finger down! As of now all you need is your beautiful voice to search Google on your desktop. Is this a sign of our increasing laziness or are we progressing towards a science fiction fact?
It could be that our need for convenience will spring board us into a Star Trek reality. Every day the amount of data we accumulate multiplies and it’s as if we are going to thrive on these technological advances just to increase our efficiencies. I’ve dreamed of the day to be walking the halls only to tap my communicator pin and query what the current movie releases are. I’m sure we are headed in the right direction but I would much prefer Google produce a hover board before moving ahead with anything else.

Scrapcology

Google’s war against scraper sites didn’t come without an ironic twist. Just moments after Matt Cutt’s released his video requesting webmasters to submit offending sites Dan Barker chimed in on Twitter. Dan proved that Google is actually an offending site by simply typing in; “What is a scraper site?” this then revealed a knowledge graph that scraped off a duplicated Wikipedia definition. Dan’s Twitter stream took on a life of its own with over 34,000 retweets making this the SEO post of the week.

Dan

Yahoo!cology

Yahoo has had a busy two months first with announcing being back in the search game and secondly purchasing Vizify. Vizify allows users to create infographic type material from their social media data and has had a very successful start. The argument is if Yahoo is actually capable of successfully maintaining Vizify because of all the trouble it’s had with its own infrastructure. It’s a little unclear what Marissa Mayer is planning with all this Yahoo action, but it seems to me that we just have to wait to see if something valuable comes out of this.

SMX

Shout out to anyone attending the SMX West conference March 11-13! During the March 10th 8:30am meet and greet they will be collecting a voluntary donation for Dana Lookadoo to help support her recovery expenses due to her unfortunate cycling accident. Every cent counts to find out more please go to SMX WEST.