1. Good Monday Morning

It’s Oct. 11th. Happy Indigenous Peoples Day. The proclamation that President Biden issued last Friday included this somber thought: “We must never forget the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country.” Biden is the first U.S. president to commemorate this holiday.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,293 words — about a 5 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:”The original Bill of Rights is nearly 230 years old, and we’re still debating the meaning of nearly each of its 652 words. If an AI Bill of Rights is our ultimate goal, we’re still at the stage of haggling over the Articles of Confederation.” — Axios’ Bryan Walsh writing about the White House’s consideration of an “AI Bill of Rights.”

a) Fueled by the pandemic,the e-commerce explosion continues. TikTok owner Byte Dance is the latest entity to leverage its incredible presence into direct sales revenue. Big box Best Buy is launching a new $199 membership program that includes free shipping, installation, and priority purchases of undefined hard-to-find items. Amazon and Walmart are focusing their sights on prescription medications. Walmart + customers can now buy common generic prescriptions for heavily discounted prices without insurance while Amazon’s pharmacy services are offering 6 month prescription renewals.

b) YouTube has removed two official accounts owned by disgraced singer R. Kelly following his conviction on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. The company cited its creator responsibility guidelines for the move. Separately, YouTube announced that it will no longer allow climate change denialists to monetize their YouTube channels beginning next month.

c) A former Amazon warehouse employee in Colorado has sued the company because she says that mandatory COVID-19 screenings before work were not considered part of a work shift and employees were not paid for that time.

3. Search Engine News — No More Internet Explorer

If you are the single person out of every 200 North Americans who is still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, you’re going to have to find some site other than Google to search. Google software engineer Malte Ubl announced on Twitter that Google search will no longer work for IE sessions. “We did the Math [sic]. It is time,” he wrote. 

Sept. 2021 browser market share by our friends at StatCounter:
Chrome 65%, Safari 18%, Edge 4%, Firefox 4%

Google also told an EU court that it is the top search term on Microsoft Bing in Europe. The thrust of the argument Alphabet makes while appealing an antitrust matter is that “People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to.”

Part of Google’s search experience includes advertising throughout the result pages. Google is now enhancing its ad disclosures to allow users to see all the ads a specific advertiser has run over the past 30 days. 

From their announcement, “.. Imagine you’re seeing an ad for a coat you’re interested in, but you don’t recognize the brand. With advertiser pages, you can learn more about that advertiser before visiting their site or making a purchase.”

4. Spotlight Explainer — Silver Beacon 

For our 400th issue, we’re taking the liberty of putting ourselves in the spotlight. We won’t have another big milestone issue until 2023, so don’t worry about this becoming a habit.

What does Silver Beacon Marketing do?

We do three distinct things: we promote an organization’s message, we increase the number of relevant people who see that message, and we track everything so we can quickly repeat what works in a continuous improvement cycle.

So it’s advertising?

We do a lot of advertising campaigns in a lot of places: Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Amazon, and a lot more.

But we also do a lot of other marketing projects like search engine optimization that ensures that your site is found online, social media messaging, websites, emails, newsletters, and marketing strategy.

Are there any special industries that you work with?

We adore small organizations and work with more than our share of startups. We love teams that have a passion for what they do. You can see our client list here. We are exceptionally proud of never needing to hire a sales staff and only running advertising sporadically over the past fifteen years. Our business is entirely built on word-of-mouth. We’re thankful for all those referrals.

Why this newsletter?

You know how photocopying articles for colleagues turned into emailing each other links and that turned into, please for the love of everything holy, let me get some work done?

We wanted to give clients, colleagues, and friends the opportunity to have us drop by once a week for 5 minutes and let them know what they need to know in a nontechnical way. We write this for people who use technology, not for technologists.

Why do you ask us to forward this to friends and others?

Aw, you know the answer to that. But seriously, send this on to friends and colleagues who can use it. You’re likely a subscriber. You know that we don’t call or send other emails. Spotlight comes out every non-holiday Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern Time. That’s it. Click here and we will add you to the list.

Thanks again. Here’s to 400 more issues.

5. Did That Really Happen? — A New Conspiracy Theory Quiz

There are six seemingly simple questions in this Washington Post quiz that asks if you’ll fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. I got all six correct. Can you do the same?

6. Following Up — EU Calls for Facial Recognition, Predictive Policing Bans

The European Parliament last Wednesday called for bans on law enforcement officers using facial recognition technology in public places and the elimination of predictive algorithms to profile “potential criminals.” We write often about police use of technology (most recently in our 2021 Spotlight in June).

It’s important to understand that it’s not the technology being questioned, but its use by police that may infringe upon your privacy.

7. Protip — Dark Mode in Google Search

Whether desktop or mobile, this explainer shows you how to enable dark mode on Google Search even if the rest of your display is set to regular view.

Screening Room — Very Stores

9. Science Fiction World — Caltech’s Secret Robot

We’ve shown you robots that scoot around and deliver food or drugs. We’ve even shown you some that can jump up or climb steps.

Caltech researchers have built LEONARDO (short for Legs Onboard Drone) that is way more mobile. LEONARDO can walk a slackline, hop, and even ride a skateboard. Check it out here, and understand that you are going to end up interacting with robots during your lifetime — even if only infrequently.

10. Coffee Break — The Monument Report

This very cool online report allows anyone to explore nearly 50,000 data records about monuments in America. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a pretty darn big data set. There are essays and articles exploring all of it as well as guides to help teach students.

Most popular: Abraham Lincoln with 193 monuments
Most popular Native Americans: Tecumseh (21) and Sacagawea (20)
Non-Americans: Columbus (149), St. Francis of Assisi (73), Joan of Arc (26)

11. Sign of the Times

1. Good Monday Morning

It’s October 4th. After a blockbuster 60 Minutes profile last night, the Wall Street Journal’s main source for The Facebook Files was identified as former project manager Frances Haugen. While at Facebook, Haugen led a team on the company’s election protection efforts. She is working with the Securities and Exchange Commission under its whistleblower protections and will appear before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday. 

Today’s Spotlight is 1,245 words — about a 4.5 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:“For years, we’ve known many of these issues — via journalists and researchers — but Facebook has been able to claim that they have an ax to grind and so we shouldn’t trust what they say. This time, the documents speak for themselves.” — Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global head of elections integrity operations to Recode. 

a) Attorneys for Donald Trump have filed a motion asking a federal judge to order Twitter to reinstate his account. Trump used his personal account while communicating as president. Twitter permanently suspended that account soon after the president tweeted about the domestic terror attack on the Capitol.

b) New Amazon products announced last week include a “robot” that is more of a single floor Amazon Echo on wheels, home monitoring and elder care services, and new devices including their first smart thermostat and Fitbit competitor. (CNBC overview)

c) Global consulting giant PwC will allow 40,000 U.S. employees to remotely work from anywhere in perpetuity and without a change in compensation. Reuters broke the story.

3. Search Engine News & Spotlight Explainer Combine For Google Search News (Here Comes MUM)

Google’s Search On product event was home to enough announcements last week for an extra big search feature this week.

There was a lot of Google-style talk about how search democratizes information and allows people to learn formerly specialized knowledge. Neither your physician nor your attorney likely agree, but it’s great for finding data.

Google’s launch of MUM (Multitask Unified Model) is the big news. This is the name of the software Google developed that will allow people to use text, images, or video combinations to find something.

People today are trained to ask a number of simple questions as they research a topic. MUM allows those steps to be combined.

One Google example: You like the pattern you see on a shirt, but would like it on socks. You can take a picture of the shirt and have Google use MUM to search for socks with that pattern. You can also click a button to see if those socks are in stock at a local store, which seems to be quite an incentive to constantly update Google with the stock status of all your items. After all, if you don’t, the next person will. 

You are going to hear a lot about Google MUM for the next few months. You can start playing with Google Lens now, which has some of its early functionality. For example, point Google Lens at text in a foreign language, click the “Translate” icon, and the image of the text is instantly rendered in your language.

Maps and location services are also Google priorities. In addition to checking in stock availability of items, Google Maps will now include layers that show wildfire data, tree coverage, and the ability to create new Google Plus Address codes. Those last are important for places without street addresses. 

A Google Plus Address Code example: The local high school has three baseball fields. Home plate at one of them is 1,200 feet from the school’s front door. The Google Plus code (87C4VHGR+RX) narrows down the area from the large school with thousands of people to the area around home plate. That baseball field has about a dozen plus codes. Delivery robots, drones and other automated services will need that level of precision.

Google will also expand information about the source of search results in addition to using MUM to improve how searches occur. The company says that there will be more fact checks, warnings to searchers when topical news results are changing fast, and an expanded “About the Source” information box to include what third parties have said about a source.

Video is the final place where Google says it will create more search context. That includes pre-populated links under videos that list the topics covered so that searchers can easily click a button to learn more about that or a related topic. The best part of this feature is that Google says it can identify a topic in a video even when the video is about a different topic.

MUM (and don’t forget its nifty near real-time universal translator to 75 human languages) is definitely coming after its announcement last spring and its star turn at Search On last week.  Google Lens, voice search, and maps will all present new search challenges and opportunities in 2022.

5. Did That Really Happen? — YouTube Bans Vaccine Misinformation

It took a global pandemic during which tens of millions of Americans refused to get vaccinated, but YouTube is removing all content with vaccine misinformation. Axios confirmed with YouTube that more than one million videos have been removed.

Full stop. People posted one million inaccurate videos about COVID-19 just to YouTube. Bad people remain a problem, but YouTube is at least done with the “both sides” argument when medical and public health experts have reached an overwhelming global consensus.

6. Following Up — NYC Protecting Delivery Workers

We’ve written a lot about the delivery workers whose efforts in dangerous circumstances allowed so many people to work remotely during the early stages of the pandemic. New York’s City Council has passed a group of six bills to protect restaurants and those workers. The laws include disclosure of how much of the tip workers receive, requiring restaurants to allow bathroom access to drivers, and caps on fees charged to restaurants. Gizmodo has great coverage.

7. Protip — Adding Alexa to iPhones

Amazon released a new widget that allows iPhone users to easily access Alexa. You still can’t call her by name, but one tap is better than open app.

Screening Room — Katy, Perry, Behr Paint & Spotify Colored Together

9. Science Fiction World — Drone Docking

A Swiss hospital is the home of the first Matternet Station. That’s a drone docking, repair, and cargo depot since you probably shouldn’t drop medical stuff on the front lawn for anyone. The hospital is the first deployment. Forty more are due to be added in Abu Dhabi.

10. Coffee Break — 2021’s Best First Pitch

Back in July when baseball season was going strong, this woman threw the most athletic first pitch I’ve ever seen. Baseball’s playoffs start tomorrow night.

11. Sign of the Times