Business Roundup Week Ending February 23

WordPress Performance Team Releases 2 More Speed-Focused Plugins

• The Core Performance Team released two plugins that accelerate lazy loading and pre-render predicted page navigation.
• The Auto-Sizes for Lazy-Loaded Images plugin sets the sizes attribute to auto for deferred images. This speeds up the download of images that will be needed when users scroll.
• The Speculation Rules plugin predicts which pages visitors may navigate to next. It pre-renders those pages before links are even clicked, using the Speculation Rules API.

Google Announces Price Changes for Workspace Accounts

• Google Workspace is raising prices for all monthly plans starting on March 14.
• Flexible monthly plans will increase around $2-3 / user / mo. depending on plan level.
• New annual plans will allow users to lock in their current rates by committing to a long-term plan
• Read the announcement with more details on the Google blog.

Reddit to Sell Data to Train AI

• Reddit has licensed its user-generated content to an unnamed AI firm for $60M annually.
• Real conversations between users on the variety of topics Reddit offers are extremely valuable source material for training AI models.
• Reddit has emphasized its commitment to ethical use of data and community trust, but the move has sparked debates on using personal content commercially while respecting privacy.
• I wonder if this means ChatGPT will start replying with considerably more snark?
• Read the full article on Bloomberg.

Worth a Look…

• Equalize Digital’s Amber Hinds demonstrates how to build a low-code accessible WooCommerce site.
• Air Canada Must Honor a Refund Policy “Invented” By Its Chatbot.
• Have some time to kill? Play Dodge from Jonathan Bossenger. Avoid the other CMSs and survive!