Webcology

WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio
  • 4.2 (6)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Biweekly

Webcology takes a deeper look at the ecosystem of the Internet as it affects webmasters and web marketers from the points of view of two well known web marketers, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger. Based on interviews with special high-profile guests or panels, Webcology introduces, explores and explains how the various segments of the web marketing world work.

  1. 6d ago

    The Searching for the South of France Edition

    Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Console is reporting its first major Generative AI reporting bug, data center heavy counties in Virginia are asking schools and municipal employees to conserve electricity any way they can, OpenAI wants to upload a 5% stake in itself to the US Government in order to increase its valuations, Trump is threatening to tariff any country that imposes digital taxes on American social media and tech companies, Anthropic's Fable5 is back with new limits, and Google has been ordered to pay an outrageous settlement nearing 2billion US dollars to Swedish price-comparison site Klarna in a massive finding over Google's search abuse.  That's the tip of an iceberg of search, social, and AI news on the Searching for the South of France Episode of Webcology Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  2. Jul 2

    The Searching for the South of France Edition

    Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Console is reporting its first major Generative AI reporting bug, data center heavy counties in Virginia are asking schools and municipal employees to conserve electricity any way they can, OpenAI wants to upload a 5% stake in itself to the US Government in order to increase its valuations, Trump is threatening to tariff any country that imposes digital taxes on American social media and tech companies, Anthropic's Fable5 is back with new limits, and Google has been ordered to pay an outrageous settlement nearing 2billion US dollars to Swedish price-comparison site Klarna in a massive finding over Google's search abuse.  That's the tip of an iceberg of search, social, and AI news on the Searching for the South of France Episode of Webcology Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  3. Jun 26

    The Learning First of Us has Died Edition

    Jim and Kristine learn of the death of the father of SEO, Bruce Clay while discussing industry announcements. Bruce is thought to be the first person to make a professional service out of improving a website to achieve better search engine results. Bruce built an agency that spanned the world with offices serving every continent except Antarctica. A staple speaker, panelist, presenter, exhibitor, and sponsor on the SEO conference circuit, Bruce's development of and support for the search marketing community helped turn a cottage industry into a multi-billion dollar a year big business. Along the way, he took a handful of a few hundred foundlings and taught us how to do the business of this business. What SEO is today is directly because of the work and career of Bruce Clay. RIP and thank you Bruce. You're going to be missed by so many.  In other news, Google rolled out a June 2026 Spam Update that lasted only slightly longer than the entire show did. News it ended was released just after we finished recording.  - Google Search Console's reporting feature is fixed - Google says it can spot spam using Sentence Bert or as we intend to refer to it, Sbert - Google's John Mueller answers questions about SEO for AI Agents - Gemini has made the Chrome browser less secure as Chrome retools itself or an agentic web. Hackers have recently demonstrated they can seize a Chrome browser using Gemini. - The US government is facing lawsuits for disallowing access to Claud Fable5 and Mythos5 models to anyone but US born citizens - The FCC is killing the $2billion program that made Internet available to many schools and public libraries - Anthropic accuses Alibaba of outright copying it, in pursuit of a building a model to rival Mythos. - Investors are showing hesitance with an AI sector unable to show how it will ever turn a profit - The Tokenopocalypse has hit large scale consultancy Accenture which, having blown through a year's worth of AI spend in three months, is scrambling to limit staff use of AI - About a third of Fintech websites are invisible to AI crawlers due to their dependence on real time data display.  - Google's John Mueller confirms the outcomes of site migrations are often impossible to fully predict ahead of time.  - Microsoft has added another 365days to the Windows10 extended update program because nearly 25% of all computers in the world continue to run Windows10 Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  4. Jun 11

    The Totally Spaced but Truly Xcited Edition

    The SpaceX IPO is about to drop in what is expected to be the world's highest value initual public offering, one that will make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. SoftBank might have shown a weakness in the AI sector when it was unable to use its 9.7% share in OpenAI as collateral against a 6Billion loan. Anthropic has released a public version of its mythical Mythos model but security experts doubt the efficacy of the guardrails Anthropic has built around the model. A German court has held Google liable for statements made by Gemini in AI Overviews. Ruling that generative AI responses are not like traditional search results because they make declarations that were written by Google itself. Claude is the fastest growing AI traffic source, outpacing ChatGPT and Gemini. Amazon has turnee Alexa into a shopping agent and ad platform. WebMCP can be used to hijack AI Agents. Chrome will not set AI Mode as the default search experience leaving traditional search results as part of the mix. Google has released new guidence for third party SEO tools, services and advice. Google Shopping Results tests linking directly to the merchant's site. And lastly, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini appear to be obesessed with a fellow named Elias Thorne. We take a look at why. All this and much more on a long and newsy Webcology. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  5. Jun 4

    The Phase1: Make Everyone Addicted - Phase2: ? - Phase3: Profit Edition

    - The May 2026 Core Update has finished rolling out. This was a content heavy update. Tips on how to find the pages containing affected content, and what to do when you find them - Law enforcement in Philadelphia are using social media to track individuals posting anti-AI memes or messages to their profiles. - Microsoft wants to make its newly announced AI personal assistant, Scout, addictive before adding functionality in the next upgrade cycle. The always on personal agent will do everything from sending emails, updating calendars, publishing new blog posts, summarizing podcast stories, etc... 404-Media quotes an internal Microsoft document outlining a three phase launch plan with phase one being, "Make people addicted".  - According to researchers at Nvidia and Microsoft, AI Agents have no moral code and don't really care about safety or reliability, much like honey badgers. - Anthropic has called for a global freeze in AI development  - Courts in the UK rule Google must let websites opt out of AI search features - SpaceX can't issue on the S&P500 for at least one year and won't be fast tracked onto the index. - TikTok launches a micro-drama development program (in partnership with the Sundance Institute) - Yahoo Scout and Microsoft Scout meet in a bar but pretend to not know each other.  - Google Business Profiles is asking "Does this business offer rewards in exchange for reviews?" Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  6. Jun 1

    The Unlawfully Designed but Fully Unified No-Click Edition

    (This episode was recorded late due to illness) - Google's May 2026 Core Update continues to roll out.  - Google has changed it's home page to promote AI features from Google I/O.  - Google Business Profiles is now offering detailed rejection notices. Previously GBP owners were left in the dark to figure out the issues on their own.  - The links report in Google Search Console is broken. It always underreported but now it's not updating.  - The Trump Administration has created at Trumptastic app which it is ordering all employees to install on government phones.  - Amnesty International has declared AIs "Unlawful by Design" taking issue with unlawful web scraping and the ease of identifying and doxing activists.  - Google CEO Sundar Pichai outlined his vision for the unification of Google Search, AI agents, and AI tools in an interview with The Verge, downplaying Zero-click web concerns.  - DuckDuckGo is taking off, tripling its traffic in a week - Stanford research shows AI hiring algorithms reject Black and Asian job seekers at far higher rates. - WordPress is slowly losing market share seeing declines six months in a row - All this and much more in the least lawfully designed yet unified edition. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  7. May 21

    The Day the Googleverse Changed

    Google announced sweeping changes to the way it displays search results at Google 1/0 2026. Going forward, Google will be presenting expanded AI generated overviews with traditional links pushed far below the fold. Most of the episode looks at Google's changes, including their moves towards facilitating agentic search. Google wants to be the "do it for you" machine. We also talk about developments with the AI giants, user privacy breaches at X and TikTok, the new version of WordPress7.0, and much, much more. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  8. May 14

    The Watching the Worlds Wizz Buy Edition

    We keep having these very long shows covering dozens of different stories because the worlds we work in are changing so rapidly and with such frequency. This is another long episode touching on over three dozen items. Here's a brief but incomplete rundown: - Google Discover data missing in GSC for May 7 - 8. If you don't see it or it looks kinda weird, it's them not you. - Google Ads is moving to passkey security for certain actions starting in mid July - Google AdSense Vignette Ads are no longer a threat for triggering Google's back-button abuse policies - Google Ads API v24.1 is out - SEO MUST READ - Ryan Jones of Razorfish and maker of SERPrecon on how a Search Engine Works (https://www.serprecon.com/blog/how-a-search-engine-works) - ICE Agents have over 20Million targets on their iPhones via Palantir - New AI Act in Colorado allows for building of data centers in state - Conde Nast anticipates search traffic to drop to single digits - Google uses AI to actively disrupt hackers - Microsoft has built a multi-agent AI system that can compete with and beat Anthropic's Mythos in cybersecurity tests - A Harvard study found AI tends to feed businesses virtual nonsense when used for strategic planning - The costs of compute are rising quickly and Anthropic is passing them to businesses and consumers - Anthropic expands Claude AI's tools for law firms - Don't ever follow ChatGPT's advice on using drugs. Just don't. A young person died after being advised he could use a toxic drug combination safely.  - AI is apparently rotting the brains of overworked software developers as AI tools start to feel like they're outsourcing their abilities to think - Grok is flailing against its larger and somewhat less douchey competitors.  - TikTok introduces tools for FIFA World Cup content creators - Google's shift to TurboQuant, a newish algorithm that radically speeds processing time, makes generative AI answers cheaper and easier to produce - An Ahrefs study showed that adding schema did not boost citations on any AI platform including at Google.  - Google no longer supports FAQ rich results - AI an unwelcome topic at commencement speeches across the nation A lot of fun conversation as we try to keep up with the speed of light.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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About

Webcology takes a deeper look at the ecosystem of the Internet as it affects webmasters and web marketers from the points of view of two well known web marketers, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger. Based on interviews with special high-profile guests or panels, Webcology introduces, explores and explains how the various segments of the web marketing world work.

Information

  • Creator
    WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio
  • Years Active
    2008 - 2026
  • Episodes
    838
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright WMR.FM
  • Show Website
    Webcology