PODCAST · business
Webcology
by WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio
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 Dave Davies. 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.
Episodes
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Two Jones Explain How Google Leaves Tool Makers Jonesing for Data
Dixon Jones, founder of Inlinks and WAIKAY, and Ryan Jones, VP-SEO at Razorfish and founder of SERPRecon are two highly experienced tool makers for search and generative AI marketers. They join Jim and Kristine to talk about how Google is actively poisoning data obtained by scrapers and how it...
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The Cynics Guide to Today's News and Lots of Google Stuff Edition
Sometimes the world gets so bent around absurdity it's hard to talk about it without somehow making it all seem so much dumber. This era exemplifies absurdity and over-amplifies dumb. Normal conversations about LLMs, the economics of technology, and the politics behind it all tend to lose focus,...
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The America is Grokken Edition
The American federal government is remaking its online presence in Trump's image. Naturally, the product doesn't work as promised and it would have likely been better had they just left whatever was there before. Nevertheless, America-dot-gov was launched earlier this week as an AI powered…
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The Googlash of Google News Edition
It's an interestingly Googlishic edition this week with several major announcements and updates. Google's September 2026 Spam Update is underway as of noon on Thursday Sept. 24. Expected to last two weeks, this is one of the longest Spam Updates in recent memory. In other huge news, Google...
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The Shut It Down but Keep It Going so We can be No1 Edition
Kristine spent much of the week in San Diego at the Brighton SEO (San Diego) Conference. She gives us a from the floor update. The vibe in the tech world this week was, "Reign in it!". The tone came from all fronts starting with the AI technologarchs themselves who are now falling over each other...
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The Viewing the Depths of the Clampdown Edition
Where the last weeks of August are usually mellow, the week after Labor Day is always hyper-intense in the tech world and it was no different this year with one pretty notable exception. In no previous year has the post-summer season opened with statements about the >10% chance the AI…
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The GSC is now Google Search Cowards Edition
In the spirit of renaming stuff that shouldn't be renamed, Jim has unilaterally renamed GSC, Google Search Cowards. Earlier this week, Google acquiesced to the Trump regime's renaming of Lake Ontario by Executive Order. Apple followed suit a couple days later. Both met waves of derision from both...
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The Playing Lose-Lose Games is Dumb Edition
Jim and Kristine talk about the reignition of the Trump regime's trade war between Canada and the United States, including an honest assessment of how it might affect Webcology's coverage of the tech world in the future. The US is trying to force Canada into annexation by punishing it…
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It's the End of the Summer as We Know It Edition
It's late summer and the tech world feels half asleep but under the surface the business of tech wears on. Google reported an impression shortage that started around August 12. Details in GSC Performance and Generative AI reports are likely incorrect but it's Google not you. OpenAI is pausing...
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Mark's mAInifesto and the Techno-Lemons Edition
It was a weird week in tech. There's a feeling like the roof is about to fall in as changes made by isolated billionaires recompile the order of our universe. Meta's owner, isolated billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wrote a 6500 word manifesto detailing how the AI future will unfold, if only we the...
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The Building Plans in an Agentic Universe Edition
Kristine is spending the week in naughty geek heaven at the annual BlackHat and Def Con conferences in Las Vegas this week. She takes a early hour on Friday to record the show and update us on the happenings among the two groups of fun loving hackers. One of the things the conferences were…
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The Age of Indifferent Agentic Attackers Edition
We are starting to learn a lot more about what OpenAI's rogue super-model/agent did last week when it broke out of its testbed, hacked onto the Internet, invaded Hugging Face's databases, and exploited its way to solving the prompt-challenge it was presented with, "... to use a complex attack...
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The Rogue Agents Invade Hugging Face Edition
An OpenAI model broke free of its test environment, found an exploit in a piece of third party server software, and commenced a series of actions that led to it hacking HuggingFace's data processing systems. OpenAI didn't detect the breach of HuggingFace for several days even though the test it…
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The Contracting Expansion of AIs Edition
As the power of AI expands exponentially the costs of AI continue to drive power-users towards conservation. Jim and Kristine discuss the introduction of the more powerful GPT5.6 introduced by OpenAI last week. They also talk about how local backlash and growing expenses are limiting the growth…
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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…
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The Day the Butler Didn't Do IT Anymore Edition
It was a busier than normal news week. Here's what we covered: - Ask Jeeves is officially dead. IAC formally killed the OG search engine earlier this week. - There's been a spike in Google Business profile suspensions. - GSC fixed the 50 week impression data logging issue. - A Hard Drive shortage...
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The May Day Edition
Chrome released a massive security update fixing over 30 vulnerabilities. Be sure you're running v147.0.7727.137/138 and accept no substitutes. Meanwhile, OpenAI founder Sam Altman's identity verification service promoted a partnership with the wrong Mars in an embarrassing mix-up of identities....
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The Too Dangerous for the Public but Too Useful to be Shelved Edition
Anthropic's Mythos is too dangerous for the open market but too useful to be ignored. Though only released to a relatively small number of large-scale developers in order for them to develop defenses to Mythos, the hyper-powerful agentic-organizer appears to have itself been hacked. A blog post...
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The Schwartz Should Be There Edition
Wikipedia erased an entry about legendary search journalist Barry Schwartz citing their editorial team's perception Barry has a commercial interest in a Wikipedia entry. That he's spent most of this century writing a daily compendium of search engine related news stories every day since 2003…
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The April's Tools Edition
The war with Iran is nearly a month old and the effects are being felt across the greater economy. One of the places it is being felt hardest is in the AI sector where chip manufacturing is based on oil, the cost of energy is rising, and general economic uncertainty is scaring investors and the…
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The Coming of the Bright Equinox Edition
As the War against Iran continues into its fourth week, the Pentagon has been told to work Claude out of its systems, literally. The Secretary of War designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk at the beginning of March and wants it gone now. OpenAI is preparing for an IPO by the end of 2026 while...
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The Buggy Ides of March Edition
A couple of GSC bugs to report of the top with BigQuery exports not working and an issue with the date selector in crawl stats. In both cases, it's a them thing, not a you thing. If you're running ads through Goolge Ads in the EU you need to confirm if the campaign has political content by the...
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The Age of the AI Wars Edition
And, suddenly last Saturday, we were at war with Iran. That will have profound effects on our economy and the tech industry. If the war is a component in a tech story, or tech is a big part of a war story, we will report and talk about it as such. If not, we'll try to leave most of the war...
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The Agents are Amassing Edition
The adoption rate of Agentic AIs appears staggering. Making, deploying, and managing AI driven agents is easier than ever. This, of course, introduces a myriad of security concerns, many of which will become apparent faster than we think. Hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger talk about...
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The Transitional Vectoring Edition
The situation remains normalizing, all facshed up. At least some of the folks working at Palantir are starting to understand what their work is doing to their world. According to reports in Wired Magazine and 404Media, employees of the meta-surveillance giant are not told how their products are...
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The New Roman Times are Changing Edition
There is no sugar coating how brutal the last week has been. ICE agents murdered yet another regular person in the American federal government's relentless and brutal crackdown on Minneapolis Minnesota. This week's extra-judicial killing was broadcast live to the Internet by dozens of bystanders...
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The Search Goes on Amidst it All Edition
Elon Musk's AI-Grok continues to churn out non-consensual images of people including sexualized images of children, an issue that continues into this week. Google is integrating core search signals into its AI Experience in AI Mode and AI Overviews. This, along with Personal Intelligence, the…
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The Nothing New Year's Back Again Episode
It's a new year which, as with all new years, brings a chance for a renewal, a hope of a new beginning, and in this, the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, that hope was dashed within 48 hours with the invasion, kidnapping, and regime change in Venezuela and the killing of Renee...
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The Webcology 2025 WTF Just Happened Year End Revue
Five high profile OG Search Engine Optimization experts talk about the year that was and the year that may well be in our annual Year End Revue. Carolyn Shelby - Principle SEO at Yoast, Ryan Jones - Senior Vice President of SEO at Razorfish and the creator of SERPrecon.com, and Topher Kohen -...
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The Christmas Breaks Upon Us So Duck and Cover Soon Edition
The December 2025 Core Update continues to roll out, as one does pretty much every year around this time. Some are seeing results early but there hasn't been a major stir or fuss from the SEO community. That might be because it is somewhat harder to judge early outcomes of a core update based on...
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The It's Getting to Look A Lot Like A Core Update Edition
It's the middle of December and throughout the Web, all the crawlers are stirring and AI Bots getting fed. The products displayed on folk's sites with due care, in hopes that St. Googlishous would bring traffic there. Suddenly somewhere in GA4 there arose such a clatter, I had to get off of my…
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A Cyber-Funday Mass Outage Edition
It was a long week following a long Thanksgiving weekend that opened on CyberMonday with a login-outage at Spotify. Folks who logged out of their Spotify accounts on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday awoke to a virtual lockout which was finally cleared between 3 and 5pm. Google Search Console reports…
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The Thankful for Those Giving Us So Much Change Edition
Even Google's Gary Illyes is saying it, "the change is hard to accept" in regards to the evolution of AI in search but that SEM and SEO will coevolve with search, just like it has the past 30 years. That optimism is something to be thankful for, even if AI is likely to mess up thousands if not...
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The Monopolies Come and Monopolies Go Edition
Adobe bought SEMrush in a $1.9Billion dollar deal putting SEO back in the middle of the boardroom again. Jim and Kristine discuss the purchase, Adobe's intentions, and the implications of Adobe owning SEMrush, Search Engine Journal, the SMX Conference circuit, and other important assets in the...
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The Major Moves of Mid-November Edition
The relentless shifts towards AI powered everything being everywhere in the digital environment are accelerating and the evolution of digital marketing services is starting to keep pace. Previsible, which recently bought the legendary agency Internet Marketing Ninjas, announced the acquisition of...
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The Grok it, All CEOs Should be AIs Edition
In a week where Telsa shareholders are likely to award CEO Elon Musk a Trillion dollar pay package, rival technologarch Sam Altman says he'll be ashamed if OpenAI wasn't the first company to be run by an AI CEO. This start a debate between Jim and Kristine in which Jim suggests the C-Level could...
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The Browser Wars - Rise of AIs Edition
OpenAI has launched its new browser Atlas built to compete with Comet, Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium based browsers. As with other AI based browsers, Atlas comes with a slew of amazing self-directing features along with the potential for a long term mess of major security flaws, exploitable...
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The AI Test Pivot Edition
Google is experimenting with several AI additions to several more Google products as it fixes bugs in its organic Google search product. It is getting to feel like SEOs are getting a better handle on how to work with and affect AI generated responses as generative AI reponses find their ways in...
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The IT's My Party I'll AI When I Wanna Edition
Jim frets as his birthday comes up for renewal again next week. Meanwhile, Google's head of search, Elizabeth Reid was featured on an Economic Times podcast last week talking about the future of search, the effects LLMs have had on both search and user behaviors, the expanding roles of Agentic…
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The Darksteel and the Circle of Life Edition
Google's August 2025 Spam Update ended four weeks after it launched in late August. Its impact was fairly significant however tracking it will be complicated by the num100 parameter change on Sept10. The bAD bug that overwhelmed some Google search users with ads has also been fixed. We learned...
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The Days the Music Died Edition
There are very dark days ahead as the Trump administration falls further towards fascism down the authoritarian hole. Between the suspension of late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel and the announcement a non-entity was going to be declared a terrorist organization is an intersection of brutal…
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The AI a la Mode Edition
AI Mode has moved beyond basic English and is now available in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. AI Mode is also available in autocomplete and is said to soon be the default of search itself. And that's just what Google's got going. Apple is working to introduce a…
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The Monopolists Anti-Accountability Edition
A GoFundMe campaign has been established to help pay Alan Blyweiss' family pay for his end of life arrangements and to helping classroom teachers buy school supplies through the Make a Wish Foundation. The August 2025 Spam Update continues to mulch its way through Google's index with few changes...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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 Dave Davies. 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.
HOSTED BY
WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Webcology have?
Webcology currently has 852 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Webcology 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 Dave Davies. Based on interviews with special high-profile guests or panels, Webcology introduces, explores and explains...
How often does Webcology release new episodes?
Webcology releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 852 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Webcology?
You can listen to Webcology on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Webcology?
Webcology is created and hosted by WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio.
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