The Content Technologist (Page 42)

A resource for content professionals working in the age of algorithms

AI & Algorithms

Baby's umpteenth tradeshow: How the news publishing industry is surfing the AI tide

What I heard and did not hear at ONA

Downtown Chicago, featuring the Chicago Tribune.

Featured stories

AI & Algorithms

Baby's umpteenth tradeshow: How the news publishing industry is surfing the AI tide

What I heard and did not hear at ONA

the business of content

How to set strategic priorities in an extended crisis

An email subject line: "Bloomberg - ICE kills US citizen"

You have more personal power than you think.

AI & Algorithms

How does AI make sense of language?

A late 2025 series aiming to break down the technologies that underpin generative AI, Large Language Models, Natural Language Understanding, and Information Retrieval. Featuring absolutely no math, minimal technical jargon, and lots of pop culture.

essays

Disambiguation, sliding doors, hallucinations, and madeleines: How transformers process, clarify, and produce language

Transformers take static vector embeddings, which assign single values to every token, and expand their context, nearly simultaneously as they process the context of every other word in the sentence. But who cares, let's listen to a pop song!

Search & Discovery

The front door to discovery: How natural language processing is the key to visibility in LLMs

a house with a white picket fence with a leafy fall lawn

To put it another way: optimizing with GEO reverse engineering tactics is like entering a house through a small attic window. GEO ignores that the research frameworks literally embedded in the outputs of the model are the keys to the front door.

Strategy

A digression on trust: Slop blogs and the accomplished UX strategist who doesn't exist

Are attractive websites more likely to trick experienced content strategists?

Latest stories

286 posts

The problem with Authority in SEO

In the SEO world we are concerned with Authority. This essay explores how SEO authority is built and recorded.

Strategy

How search and content recommendation algorithms work

You're right to be skeptical of organic search algorithms. But it's also helpful to have an awareness of their very human characteristics. Here's how search and content algorithms work, broken down for the non-experts.

Grading the extreme complexity of search appearance: Morningscore review

Morningscore provides entry- to intermediate-level SEO analysis and tracking functionality, assigning websites a score based on organic search rankings and visibility. Read The Content Technologist review.

If Likes are gone, what you should measure on Instagram?

How should you measure Instagram when Likes are gone? Read about some engagement metrics that tell you the real story.

A shortcut to website redesign scoping: The Postlight RFP Builder

The talented developers at Postlight put together a handy tool to help you understand what your needs will be for the website RFP process. Read The Content Technologist review.

SEO basics for 2020: What Google's BERT update means for content creators

BERT supposedly affects up to 10% of all search queries. It may have affected legacy news websites quite a bit. If you have a large content-driven website, you may have seen a change. Read more about how changes from BERT may affect your website and content business.