This week we feature a paper by Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, Edward McFowland, Ethan Mollick, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Katherine C. Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, François Candelon, & Karim R. Lakhani, and an article by Sixing Huang.

Additional reading comes from Doug Shapiro, Cassie Kozyrkov, Fabrice Canel, and Andrej Karpathy.

News comes from Acquia, Expert[.]ai, MongoDB, and Atlan

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

Navigating the jagged technological frontier: field experimental evidence of the effects of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality

There is lots of speculation and anecdotal evidence on the efficacy of generative AI. This working paper from HBS, with Wharton, Sloan, and BCG focuses on a “highly skilled knowledge workers” — in this case 758 Boston Consulting Group strategy consultants. Well worth the read. The link below is to the abstract, which has some top line findings, along with a link to the full paper.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4573321

The same, or not the same — that is the problem of entity resolution

To the uninitiated, entity resolution can sound straightforward, but alas, it is usually devilishly complex. Sixing Huang describes some challenges with examples in biomedical and customer data, and provides the methods he uses to deal with them. His approach will be helpful for other applications. (9 min)

https://medium.com/codex/the-same-or-not-the-same-that-is-the-problem-of-entity-resolution-32d2b8d6dd34

More Reading

• Not just for media… Power laws in culture – why hits will persist in an infinite content world via Doug Shapiro
• Good advice to minimize… Why data will disappoint you via Towards Data Science
• Useful… New options for webmasters to control usage of their content in Bing Chat via Microsoft Bing Blog
• Short, but lots to think about… a more complete picture is emerging of LLMs not as a chatbot, but the kernel process of a new Operating System via X/Twitter

All Gilbane Advisor issues

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Content technology news

Acquia launches Acquia Exchange Integration Hub for Open DXP

One-stop source for martech and developer tools that extend Acquia’s open and composable digital experience platform (DXP).
https://www.acquia.com/integrations

Expert[.]ai launches Enterprise Language Model for Insurance (ELMI)

ELMI offers insurers a flexible language model built specifically to accelerate core processes from underwriting to claims.
https://www.expert.ai/expert-ai-launches-enterprise-language-model-for-insurance-elmi/

MongoDB announces new Atlas Vector Search capabilities

Integration with Confluent Cloud and MongoDB Atlas Vector Search allows developers access to real-time data streams from a variety of sources.
https://www.mongodb.com/press/new-mongodb-atlas-vector-search-capabilities-help-developers-build-and-scale-ai-applications

Atlan launches Tag Management, enabling bi-directional tag sync

Data teams can use Atlan as the control plane so data assets tagged in Atlan are tagged and protected across everywhere in the data ecosystem.
https://atlan.com

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

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This week we feature articles by Raluca Budiu, Feifei Liu, Emma Cionca, & Amy Zhang, and Dhanshree Shripad Shenwai.

Additional reading comes from Matthew Tyson, Milton Hwang, Alan Morrison, and George Stavrakis.

News comes from Amazon & Anthropic, Contentful, Writer, and StreamText.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

Information foraging with generative AI: a study of 3 chatbots

Nielsen Norman Group does their thing — focusing on the user experience… “In a study of ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing Chat, users found these tools helpful and trustworthy. They expected these AI chatbots to aggregate information in a concise and specific manner, while fully considering contextual cues.” (20 min)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/generative-ai-diary

Researchers from the University of Oregon and Adobe introduce CulturaX: a multilingual dataset with 6.3T Tokens in 167 languages tailored for large language model (LLM) development

This looks like an especially worthwhile contribution to open source datasets for LLM training given its size and the number of languages included. Dhanshree Shripad Shenwai provides a summary of the paper with links to it, as well as to the dataset now available on HuggingFace. 

(3 min) Summary: https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/09/22/researchers-from-the-university-of-oregon-and-adobe-introduce-culturax-a-multilingual-dataset-with-6-3t-tokens-in-167-languages-tailored-for-large-language-model-llm-development/
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.09400v1.pdf

More Reading

• Debate for developers… Intro to HTMX: Dynamic HTML without JavaScript via InfoWorld
• For marketers… Rethinking content governance in the era of generative AI via Martech 
• Collaborative visual knowledge graph modeling at the system level via DataScienceCentral
• Extracting text from PDF files with Python: A comprehensive guide via Towards Data Science

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Content technology news

Amazon and Anthropic announce strategic collaboration to advance generative AI

Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership in the company. Anthropic to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/9/amazon-and-anthropic-announce-strategic-collaboration-to-advance-generative-ai ■ https://www.anthropic.com

Contentful launches composable content platform in AWS Marketplace

Platform unlocks digital content from across the organization so teams can collaborate effectively to craft and deliver digital experiences.
https://www.contentful.com/partners/technology/aws/

Writer gets $100 million series B to deliver generative AI to enterprises

Platform embeds AI into any business process and pairs Writer-built LLMs with Knowledge Graph which integrates with business data sources.
https://writer.com

StreamText updates Automatic Speech Recognition Caption platform

StreamText can support human and AI-based caption generation workflows to ensure accessibility at events, in the classroom, and in meetings.
https://streamtext.net/automatic-captions/

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we feature articles by Mike Loukides, and Danilo Najkov.

Additional reading comes from Maria Stasimioti, Sarah K. White, Natasha Lomas, and Wangchunshu Zhou, Ningyu Zhang, Peng Cui, et al.

News comes from Adobe, Acquia, Netlify, and Cloudinary.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

The real problem with software development

“It’s not writing code, it’s managing complexity”. So true. Mike Loukides has an excellent piece explaining what this means for modern software development, and for the utility of generative AI coding. This non-technical article (no code) is useful for anyone who has to make decisions about, or understand, software development projects, strategy, or operations. (5 min)

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-real-problem-with-software-development/

Unlocking the power of facial blurring in media: A comprehensive exploration and model comparison

Danilo Najkov reports on his project to understand how face detection and blurring is currently being accomplished. He compares algorithms used, and provides visual examples, and a web application he built to do so. (12 min)

https://towardsdatascience.com/unlocking-the-power-of-facial-blurring-in-media-a-comprehensive-exploration-and-model-comparison-261031603513

More Reading

• MADLAD-400… Google’s new multilingual machine translation model for low resource languages via slator
• From Deloitte… 12 most popular AI use cases in the enterprise today via CIO Magazine
• Agents: An open-source framework for autonomous language agents via AIWaves
• Good piece on the tradeoffs… A closer look at e/OS: Murena’s privacy-first ‘deGoogled’ Android alternative via TechCrunch 

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Content technology news

Adobe unveils Adobe GenStudio for enterprises

Solution combines content ideation, creation, production and activation to support the enterprise content supply chain with generative AI.
https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2023/Adobe-Unveils-Adobe-GenStudio-for-Enterprises/default.aspx

Acquia adds generative AI to digital asset management platform

Native integration for AI-generated product and image descriptions to speed time to market for digital assets used across customer channels.
https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-dam-generativeai

Netlify announces Software Developer Kit (SDK)

New suite to accelerate modern web development for enterprise developers with a streamlined, accelerated path to composable web architecture.
https://www.netlify.com/products/software-development-kit

Cloudinary updates Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform

Studio is a new feature that allows allows non-technical users to quickly adapt images and video with built-in generative AI capabilities.
https://cloudinary.com

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we feature articles by Reggie Raye & K. Alexandria Bond, and Michael Blau.

Additional reading comes from Tom Krazit, Carl Franzen, Lukas Blecher, Guillem Cucurull, Thomas Scialom & Robert Stojnic, and Paul Baier, Jimmy Hexter, & John J. Sviokla.

News comes from Kobai & Databricks, Merkle, InfluxData, and Neo4j.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

Text-to-CAD: risks and opportunities

I haven’t seen much discussion of generative AI and 3D, where the output is a 3D CAD model rather than an image, but of course this is already a thing. Reggie Raye & K. Alexandria Bond provide a readable and useful overview of some tools to use, as well as advice on dealing with the unique design and engineering applicable. (12 min)

https://thegradient.pub/text-to-cad/

Secrets, and how to prove them: A magician’s guide to zero-knowledge proofs

If you’ve read multiple explanations of what a zero-knowledge proof is and you’re not convinced you’ve quite got the hang of it, or you are confident you have, but are looking for a non-technical explanation, you know, for a friend, you’ll appreciate this short demo and explanation by magician by Michael Blau — though he keeps his secret. He also works with crypto investors. (3 min)

https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/a-magicians-guide-to-zero-knowledge-proofs/

More Reading

• WASM update… WebAssembly: Some assembly still required via Runtime
• Nougat: Neural optical understanding for academic documents. Noble quest (very technical) via Meta AI
• McKinsey unveils its own generative AI tool for employees via VentureBeat
• Where should Your company start with GenAI? via HBR

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Content technology news

Merkle launches global composable commerce accelerator for Salesforce Commerce

Developed to work with Contentful and Magnolia content management systems, the accelerator extends Salesforce Commerce Cloud and streamlines integration.
https://www.merkle.com/en/merkle-now/press-releases/2023/merkle-launches-global-composable-commerce-accelerator-for-sales.html

InfluxData Announces InfluxDB Clustered

The rebuilt database engine is optimized for real-time analytics with higher performance, unlimited cardinality, and SQL support.
https://www.influxdata.com

Kobai announces partnership with Databricks

Kobai’s Saturn platform is embedded directly in the data layer, allowing organizations to query data without moving it from the lakehouse.
https://www.kobai.io/articles/strategic-partnership-between-databricks-and-kobai

Neo4j adds vector search within its native graph database

Enables customers to achieve richer insights from semantic search and generative AI applications, and serve as long-term memory.
https://neo4j.com/press-releases/neo4j-vector-search/

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we feature articles by Ina Fried & Scott Rosenberg, and Peter Lawrence.

Additional reading comes from Vitalik Buterin, Daniel Smilkov & Nikhil Thorat, and Jan Kammerath.

News comes from Google, Open AI, ElevenLabs, Bloomreach, and DeltaXML.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

AI could choke on its own exhaust as it fills the web

In the last issue before our summer break we recommended a paper on LLM model collapse, caused by LLMs training on data sets that include previously generated data. This week Ina Fried, Scott Rosenberg provide a short and useful summary of this and other “AI disorders” and some of the repercussions as more generated data populates the web. (3 min). 

https://www.axios.com/2023/08/28/ai-content-flood-model-collapse

Having a tough chat with an LLM about knowledge graph paths

There is a lot of enthusiasm around pairing knowledge graphs and LLMs, but there is also a lot to learn. Peter Lawrence is on the case, and in this article explores how “an LLM can be tuned or prompted with a knowledge graph, to answer tough questions about shortest paths through the graph.” (15 min)

https://blog.gopenai.com/having-a-tough-chat-with-an-llm-about-knowledge-graph-paths-d4fc43f97332

More Reading

• Fascinating and way detailed… What do I think about Community Notes? via Vitalik Buterin
• Introducing Lilac open source product to analyze, structure, and clean unstructured data with AI. via Lilacml Blog
• A practioners journey… Relational database systems are becoming a problem — but what to do about it? via Jan Kammerath

All Gilbane Advisor issues

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Content technology news

Duet AI for Google Workspace now available

With Duet AI, we added AI as a real-time collaborator that can act as a coach, source of inspiration, and productivity booster.
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/duet-ai-in-workspace-now-available

Introducing ChatGPT Enterprise

Offers enterprise-grade security & privacy, higher-speed GPT-4 access, longer context windows, advanced data analysis, and customization options.
https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-enterprise

XElevenLabs releases Eleven Multilingual v2

New foundational deep learning model supporting multilingual capabilities across 28 languages to broaden and improve accessibility of content.
https://elevenlabs.io/blog/multilingualv2/

Bloomreach announces Clarity

Businesses connect conversations to product catalogs, and integrate individual conversations across channels, including website, chat, and SMS.
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/products/clarity

DeltaXML improves CALS table handling to merge products

Flexible n-way comparison and merge of CALS tables to produce rigorous and accurate comparisons. Supports table versions different structures.
https://www.deltaxml.com

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we feature articles by Amber Case, and Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, & Ross Anderson.

Additional reading comes from Raiza Martin & Steven Johnson, Jerry Liu, Sara Fischer, and Nikhil Simha.

News comes from Adobe, CrafterCMS, and Bloomreach.

👉 It’s time for our annual summer break. Our next issue will be published on September 6. I hope you all have a pleasant, and not-too-hot-or-rainy, August.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

The curse of recursion: Training on generated data makes models forget

Training on generated data is an iffy proposition at best, yet it is also difficult to avoid, or even detect. This is not an unknown problem, but is certainly under-appreciated. This paper argues that the problem is unavoidable and explains why. There is lots of math but the narrative is well written, making the paper useful even for the math-squeamish. (28 min)

“Model Collapse is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models, where generated data end up polluting the training set of the next generation of models; being trained on polluted data, they then mis-perceive reality.”…

Abstract: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 Full PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf

How to identify “Truthy” tech trends

Amber Case provides an entertaining, and at least mostly true, analysis of truthiness in tech. It’s also likely that most of us know multiple people who would benefit from reading it. (8 min)

https://caseorganic.medium.com/how-to-identify-truthy-tech-trends-70f553c5a445

More Reading

• “An AI-first notebook, grounded in your own documents” Introducing NotebookLM via Google Labs
• LLM-powered knowledge workers… Data Agents via LlamaIndex blog
• AP strikes news-sharing and tech deal with OpenAI via Axios
• Case study… Chronon — A declarative feature engineering framework via The Airbnb Tech Blog

All Gilbane Advisor issues

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Content technology news

Adobe Firefly supports prompts in over 100 languages

Users can now generate high-quality images, create text effects, streamline workflows and improve productivity in their language of choice.
https://firefly.adobe.com

CrafterCMS release version 4.1

The updated CMS includes several new content authoring features for creating content-centric digital experiences, and a switch to OpenSearch.
https://craftercms.com

Bloomreach supports OAuth 2.0 authentication

Businesses have the ability to integrate Bloomreach Engagement with third-party applications that require OAuth through webhooks.
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2023/bloomreach-now-supports-frictionless-integrations-with-third-party-applications-requiring-oauth-2.0-authentication-method

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we feature an article by Boaz Barak.

Additional reading comes from Anna Kaley, Maria Rosala, Kara Pernice & Patty Caya, Rachel Andrew, Tom Davenport & Maryam Alavi, and Dean Allemang.

News comes from Brightspot, dtSearch, Databricks, and Snowflake.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

Metaphors for AI, and why I don’t like them

Boaz Barak finds metaphors very useful tools for facilitating understanding, but as Dennett ‘intuition pumps’ that leave out complicating detail. Barak is concerned that the use of metaphors to explain AI is leading to “over-interpretation”. In this excellent piece he looks at the ‘stochastic parrot’, ‘blurry JPEG of the web’, and other AI metaphors to make his case for caution. (13 min)

https://windowsontheory.org/2023/06/28/metaphors-for-ai-and-why-i-dont-like-them/

More Reading

• 10 best intranets of 2023: What makes them great via Nielsen Norman Group
• New to the web platform in May and June via web .dev
• Good read for senior managers… How to train Generative AI using your company’s data via HBR .org
• Sometimes it looks like they do… LLM, explain yourself! via Dean Allemang

All Gilbane Advisor issues

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Content technology news

dtSearch updates enterprise products

dtSearch enterprise and developer product line searches terabytes across online and offline data; products can run on premises or the cloud.
https://www.dtsearch.com

Brightspot integrates OpenAI

Content creators can leverage AI-assisted suggestions for headlines, subheadlines and full body text to expedite the content-creation process.
https://www.brightspot.com/cms-resources/tag/artificial-intelligence

Databricks announces LakehouseIQ

LakehouseIQ is a knowledge engine using generative AI to provide useful, contextual answers to natural language questions from all approved employees.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-lakehouseiq-ai-powered-engine-uniquely-understands-your-business

Snowflake unveils large language model to extract data from documents

Document AI leverages Snowflake’s first-party large language model to unlock deeper insights from unstructured data in documents.
https://www.snowflake.com/news/snowflake-unveils-new-large-language-model-to-extract-deeper-insights-from-documents-while-continuing-to-advance-platform-speed-and-performance/

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we feature articles from Shirui Pan, Linhao Luo, Yufei Wang, Chen Chen, Jiapu Wang & Xindong Wu, and Maria Antoniak, Li Lucy, Maarten Sap & Luca Soldaini.

Additional reading comes from Jon Udell, Fabio Matricardi, Mark Sundstrom, and Rhiannon Williams.

News comes from MongoDB, Drupal, Databricks, and Bloomreach & Shopware.

Note: We’ll be off next week and back on July 12th.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

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Opinion / Analysis

Unifying large language models and knowledge graphs: A roadmap

We’ve been focused mostly on practitioner-authored articles on this topic. This comprehensive paper is a useful resource for practitioners, strategists, and researchers alike. It is well written and illustrated, and a valuable reference that will come in handy at multiple points in related projects. (50 min)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.08302.pdf

Using large language models with care

This is not news, but researchers Maria Antoniak, Li Lucy, Maarten Sap, and Luca Soldaini from The Allen Institute provide an important public service with their “introductory outline of the risks of LLMs, written for the everyday user.” This will be directly helpful to some of us, but especially useful for sharing with certain colleagues, or family and friends. (11 min)

https://blog.allenai.org/using-large-language-models-with-care-eeb17b0aed27

More Reading

• Why LLM-assisted table transformation is a big deal Some of you will know this – either way, a useful short read. via Jon Udell
•  Fun take on hype cycles for programmers… XML is the future via Bite code!
• For adventurous DIY’s like Fabio Matricardi… Answering questions about your documents using LangChain (and not OpenAI) via Artificial Corner
• Sad, but inevitable… The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI via MIT Technology Review

All Gilbane Advisor issues

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Content technology news

MongoDB launches five new capabilities for MongoDB Atlas

The new MongoDB features can help speed up innovation by standardizing workloads on a single developer data platform across the enterprise.
https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-launches-five-new-capabilities-for-mongodb-atlas-to-build-new-classes-of-applications

Drupal 10.1 is now available

Customizing the look of your site easier, adds support for decoupled navigation, improves content modeling and editing, block management…
https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/10.1.0

Databricks announces Lakehouse Apps

Databricks customers will be able to discover, deploy, and manage data and AI applications directly from Databricks.
https://www.databricks.com

Bloomreach and Shopware partner

Bloomreach’s marketing automation, product discovery, and content management will enhance Shopware e-commerce customer’s customer journeys.
https://www.bloomreach.com ■ https://www.shopware.com/en/

All content technology news

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The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact