Things We Liked in 2022

Check out things we found interesting in 2022 from the worlds of the Internet, Web Development, Food, Digital Marketing and more. 

re: Internet & AI

AI has officially come for our jobs.

Watch Youtuber Devin Nash discuss the content tool: Chat GPT-3b.

Is Search ahead of its time, or falling behind?

Google continues to make updates and release algorithm updates frequently in order to improve usability and accuracy of search. Updates favor original content and Google is constantly working to better understand nuanced searches. But at what point do we tire from Google’s favored search results? 

…Savvy users of the platform no longer type instinctive keywords into the search bar and hit “Enter.” The best Googlers—the ones looking for actionable or niche information, product reviews, and interesting discussions—know a cheat code to bypass the sea of corporate search results clogging the top third of the screen.

Read: The Open Secret of Google Search

re: Workplace planning

Creating positive intentions

As a team we go through the process of planning and visioning every year. This helps us visualize our goals and it’s also a fun way to understand your coworkers’ goals and career aspirations. 

Read: Why and How Visioning Works

Trust the process

Part of learning is making mistakes but, while failure is necessary, it still hurts most of the time. Learning how to embrace failure takes practice, time and patience but in the long run, re-defining our relationship with failure and errors helps us gain perspective and to hopefully grow a bit more confident.   

Is real failure about expectations and imaginary failure about feelings? What’s the difference between a dramatic failure and a generative setback?

Read: How to embrace mistakes without romanticizing failure

Getting pushed into the business mosh pit

There are many similarities between Punk Rock and business. Both reward the key values: inclusivity, identifying and creating opportunity, and celebrating community.

The essence of punk rock is that it disturbs us — by challenging conventional norms and ideas — in order to create the opportunity for new ideas to be considered.

Read: Steve Albini Shows That Punk Rock Ethics Are Good Business

re: Cookies

Recipe for Blood Orange Molasses Cookies. Delicious.

Read: Blood Orange Molasses Cookies recipe

Re: Media

Love songs

Songs paired with Youtube comments describing very deep and personal experiences. Some sad, some delightful. The Sound of Love allows you to browse comments with each song playing as a soundtrack. The pairing of the comments with each song is pretty perfect.

Experience: The Sound of Love

Lifes a game

Drawing connections between social media, school grades and games. It can be argued that all of life’s major systems mirror gamified systems. Ultimately, these games are an endless cycle.

Our desires, motivations and behaviors are constantly being shaped and reshaped by incentives and systems that we aren’t even aware of.

Listen to: A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life

A short film on golf, rural America, things that change, and things that don’t

re: Digital marketing & analytics

GA4: all everyone’s been talking about all year

The transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 is a process we’ve been tackling for a large portion of 2022. In the process of migrating data, there may be some instances in which data is not translated in the best way. Thankfully there’s a large community of Analytics folks out there looking out for one another.

Read the Twitter thread about avoiding cardinality in GA4.

Tags, tags, tags across the board

Server-side tagging has garnered popularity this past year since it allows you to control how your data is being processed by third-party platforms. Server-side tagging can promote a more organized data collection system and help you better utilize your data in general.

Read: Benefits of server-side tagging

Garfield