Jim Hedger returns from bereavement time as he and cohost Kristine Schachinger learn that Matt Mullenweg has found a way to make the WordPress controversy much worse that it was when it started by banning WPEngine, establishing a loyalty pledge complete with a box to check to swear your WP-Loyalty, running down investors, getting himself and the commercial arm of WordPress sued for Extortion, and very possibly sacrificing small animals on the beach at midnight. Meanwhile SEOs contemplate what a DOJ mandated break-up of Google might look like while at the same time thinking about how to guide clients through questions about AI bots. X changes the way it pays content creators, and Bing has another one of its own Generative Search Experience rolling out. To round things out, Google pulled a manual job on Forbes Advisor over Reputation Abuse. Google is also rolling out newly AI organized search results and clarifying support for robots.txt fields while dropping support for the "noarchive" meta tag directive. More importantly, Google has updated its Web Search Spam Policies to be clearer about Site Reputation Abuse. We sort of learn how Google pays for all this, by seeing nearly 9,000 ad campaigns established every second!

A war is being waged in the deepest heart of the Open Source movement for that movement's very soul. Last week, Matt Mullenweg, the original founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress, laid down his version of the law by banning WPEngine from the greater WordPress environment. The dispute centers around money and time contributed to the collective which provides the engineering for WordPress. From Mullenweg's perspective, WPEngine has contributed too little of either after extracting hundreds of millions in revenues over the years. From WPEngine's perspective, "WTF eh?" Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to make sense of a fight that threatens the web's very understanding of what Open Source means. Meanwhile, Sam Altman has pushed OpenAI away from being a non-profit to being a for-profit benefit organization with Altman enjoying a 7% stake in the newly constituted company. This has pushed several key figures at OpenAI, including CTO Mira Murati and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew to resign in the past week. In other news, Google has killed its helpful Cache feature while updating its Web Search Spam policies. Google also reported and is fixing a noindex bug that caused several JavaScript driven pages to be indexed when Google couldn't read the protocol. The show covered a lot more Google news in what was a busy post-COVID show after Jim caught and was sidelined last week by his first (and hopefully last) bout with the virus.

So it seems that anyone who's anyone has an anti-trust suit or some other major legal challenge taking place, especially if you're with Apple or Google. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the various anti-trust cases covering two types of Googley advertising monopolies and a spiffy tax dodge scheme the EU's angry with Apple and Google over. We also talk about the introduction of Gemini AI to Google's productivity suite including the feature that can turn your notes into a generic podcast. BTW, "Rutabaga". That's this week's safe word that proves we're real. Kristine introduces a story that suggests families should come up with safe words to combat AI loan scams in which the scammers run a short clip of a voice through AI to convince people's parents to send them money. Twixter is leaving San Francisco and the right wing American propaganda network, Tenet Media is shuttered by the DOJ because they're a front from Russian malfiance. We also talk about a lot of Googley goodness including Martin Splitt's declaration that no Exif Data was parsed to generate those search or image results, Google's spam warnings about misuse of their Indexing API, the move from FID to INP, and how changing your heading heirarchy isn't the massive fix you might think it is. Remember, rutabaga. Accept no substitutes.