Matthew J. Brown

Matthew J. Brown

@mjb.bsky.social

It’s me, MJB. Portland things and food.

556 followers334 following145 posts

Matthew J. Brown
@mjb.bsky.social

End of campaign ad: "Do you want data centers built in your national parks?" - easy layup, use AI to write the ad if you want some irony in there.

Adam Keiper@adamkeiper.com

"For more than a year, the National Park Service has been quietly working to fulfill an unprecedented directive from Trump officials: Parcel off a corner of Yosemite National Park to give to a private developer." www.notus.org/agencies/tru...

notus.orgTrump’s Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private DeveloperThe National Park Service is under pressure to make an unprecedented deal that cedes a quarter-mile strip of the park.

Matthew J. Brown reposted

Jason Koebler
@jasonkoebler.bsky.social

New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...

404media.coIt Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."
Matthew J. Brown
@mjb.bsky.social

Search is an SEO game played at inference time, with a few links skimmed under token pressure, and it is a poor substitute for something that should be deeply woven into the model’s understanding of the world.

Paul Kinlan@paul.kinlan.me

What is in the models is a reflection of the web that was and not the web that is. I think this is a huge challenge for the ecosystem and something we can solve with tools until the models cut-off date is today and not 6 months ago aifoc.us/please-mind-...

aifoc.usplease mind the model gapI’m building software every day at a pace I’ve never managed before, even when I wasn’t a manager. The tools (Claude, Codex, Antigravity) have unlocked a huge amount of potential and given me the abil...
Matthew J. Brown
@mjb.bsky.social

I eventually tapped out of the overhead bin wars and can both arrive and board late.

William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social

If we’re doing nuclear airport takes: if you’re going there for less than six months, you’re not going to be doing anything requiring specialized equipment, and you’re not going to an extremely austere or remote place, which is >90% of most people’s travel, checking baggage is a skill issue.

Matthew J. Brown
@mjb.bsky.social

Last week I learned my vet clinic might be owned by a predatory VC firm. This week I guess we're doing bowling alleys.

M. Nolan Gray 🥑@mnolangray.bsky.social

An underrated addendum to the Bowling Alone story is that North America's largest bowling operator (Bowlero) is a publicly traded company whose business model involves buying mom and pop alleys, shutting down the leagues, and trying to attract casual, higher paying, one-off players.

Matthew J. Brown reposted

michael512.bsky.social
@michael512.bsky.social

Links still matter to Google (no matter what they say), and so it's no wonder there's lots of companies selling links. But I'm amazed at how many really bad linkbuilding still goes on...and how many people charge for complete garbage. www.michaelcottam.com/laughably-ba...

michaelcottam.com12 Laughably Bad Linkbuilding Schemes - Michael CottamWe've all had a dumb idea or two in our life, right? Today, I'm going to cover a number of common link building schemes that are either worthless, or

Matthew J. Brown reposted

Cyrus Maxx
@zyppy.com

Happy to announce *Zyppy List* - A reimagined directory for marketing companies and consultants 🆓 Free Verification 💸 No Pay-to-Rank 🎯 Highly Specialized Categories 🤝 Community-powered endorsements 👥 People-Powered Profiles 🔗 Followed link(!) Let me know what you think! zyppy.com/marketing/an...

zyppy.comAnnouncing Zyppy List: A Next-Level Directory For Marketing Pros - Zyppy SEO ConsultingThe Problem There are 1000s of marketing companies out there, many of them excellent. Finding a trusted, proven one online is amazingly difficult. When my consultancy gets more business than we can ha...
Matthew J. Brown
@mjb.bsky.social

"sooner or later those doves will poop in your sleeve" - SEO 2024/2025.

Dr. Pete Meyers@dr-pete.bsky.social

I wrapped up our internal findings on Site Reputation Abuse into something that I hope gives people a little guidance. It's an evolving situation, but here's what we know so far and a framework for assessing your risk (explained in detail in the post) -- moz.com/blog/site-re...

Matthew J. Brown
@mjb.bsky.social

@searchliaison.bsky.social @googlenews.bsky.social This train is coming, real fast.

Ryan Haas@ryanjhaas.bsky.social

Last month, I fell down an absolutely bizarre rabbit hole trying to figure out who was ripping off articles from Oregon journalists. What I found was identity theft, plagiarism and an absolutely terrifying future for local journalism led by AI scammers. My latest:

opb.orgAI slop is already invading Oregon’s local journalismThe Ashland Daily Tidings — established as a newspaper in 1876 — ceased operations in 2023, but if you were a local reader, you may not have known because of an elaborate scam using artificial intelli...
Matthew J. Brown
@mjb.bsky.social

Good up-to-date guidance on how to use Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights. Or just use WebPageTest like always.

Barry Pollard@tunetheweb.com

Some of you complain that PageSpeed Insights is a bit unrealistically show for the Lighthouse test. The PSI servers are a bit underpowered so we're changing the throttling, which should make the Performance score go up when this rolls out in the next few weeks. github.com/GoogleChrome... 🧵 1/5

github.comRelease v12.2.3 · GoogleChrome/lighthouseFull Changelog This release is only for PageSpeed Insights and we expect it to ship within 2 weeks. Notable Changes The CPU throttling factor for PageSpeed Insights has been adjusted (#16256) to ac...

Matthew J. Brown reposted

Matt Pearce
@mattdpearce.com

no better evidence that we’ve got a couple trillion-dollar squatters holding the internet back than the fact that a company with 20 employees can make a better platform than Meta

Clayton Cubitt@claytoncubitt.bsky.social

Bluesky has 'em shook