Jono Alderson with Jason Barnard at TakeItOffline Amsterdam 2019
Starts with a yawn. Then he forgets one of his jobs. Jono’s current job at Yoast and it is his double dream job – his role is to turn up at work and think of fun and interesting things to work on that are impactive. I have never had a real job, and spending a couple of days at Yoast HQ is the first time I have thought it might be nice. Jono could have chosen anything he wanted to work on, and he chose Schema.org (the most boring thing on the web).
He is swimming in Relationships, philosophy, … and then he gets into the pure scale of what they are doing – 14% of the web uses Yoast… Um. Wow. And on top of that, they need to be backwards compatible and remain compatible with all the plugins that hook into Yoast and all the badly coded sites. One simple, genius idea has made all this possible (like all the best systems). Schema.org markup gives Google confirmation, confidence and precision. Jono wants a t-shirt! Google are rolling out a conveyor belt of carrots (in the form of embellishments and additions to rich results).
Next up is booking a restaurant or buying a product enabled by Schema.org (and we find out why a Bose headphone costs $33900). Quick discussion about Joomla and Typo3 (Jono likes Typo3). Followed by a bit of memory loss. Jono then gives a quick rundown of how and why Google are betting the farm on WordPress.
Lastly, Yoast is Investing very heavily in Schema.org – it is the future of the web, apparently… as big a jump as from Web 1 to Web 2. From interactive communities to interoperable data.
