ResearchBuzz

Scott Thompson is gone, which you have probably heard, at Yahoo. Here’s a quick roundup on who’s in charge now. (Yahoo is a mess.)

Geofeedia: search social media by geographical location. Sounds like a great tool; unfortunately it’s got a pretty huge price tag.

Arizona State University is going to digitize its insect collection. “For the first time, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide funding to the university and nine other institutions to help digitize and network images and label data of 750,000 arthropod specimens.”

Two history professors are building a database of runaway slave advertisements. This looks like it’ll start with Mississippi and then expand outward. I hope they have an intern who’s searching the already extant digitized papers; there’s a wealth of information there.

LOVE projects like this. Indonesian street art — the digital archive.

The state of Tenneseee has a new jobs database.

More local newspapers being digitized. “Partnering 142 years of local newspapering with a year’s worth of new, state-of-the-art digital technology, the resulting “Digitizing Greencastle: Newspapers 1837-1979″ project was unveiled to the public Wednesday evening at the Putnam County Public Library.”

I’m not sure what the “real cost” of law school is, but there’s a new database available to help you calculate it. “Law School Transparency has unveiled a comprehensive database detailing a broad range of information designed to guide prospective law students about what they might be getting into — including school-by-school statistics about post-graduation employment and salaries; tuition rates; and student debt loads.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Have you heard about Bing’s upcoming changes to its search page? here’s an overview. I kind of vaguely like the idea of seeing what my LinkedIn contacts like…

Twitter has updated its mobile site.

A new database to monitor Africa investments: “United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) has launched an online database to track the volume of investments into various parts of Africa and the reasons behind the trends. The database will enable investors to map out which countries are getting high foreign investments and why and which sectors of every country are the most attractive.”

The Toronto Star has launched a digital archive of Ernest Hemingway columns.

Wants to see how animals and plants are distributed around the world? Map of Life. “The demonstration version allows users to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and North American freshwater fish.”

A new Web site for information about the brain — BrainFacts.org.

Look at you, St. Louis Fed, making with the digital archives!

The state of Indiana has launched a new online tool for finding child care options.

So there’s this guy, Brian Ellis, and he’s putting together what sounds like an amazing Audobon site. “The website contains biographical information and time lines regarding Audubon, who lived between 1785 and 1851. Research papers about Audubon, authored by college professors, are posted.” Ellis apparently performs as John Audubon. Some pictures on the site.

Hey, the Colorado music scene has a digital archive! Good morning, Internet…

GREAT NEWS from the 1940 U.S. Census Community Project! “The 1940 U.S. Census Community Project announced today the availability of a free, searchable index of 1940 U.S. census records for six U.S. states, including Delaware, Colorado, Kansas, Oregon, Virginia and New Hampshire. Records for these states are now searchable by name, location and family relations thanks to the efforts of more than 100,000 volunteers nationwide.”

Pretty smart! A site (a few sites actually) for finding fitness classes while you’re travelling.

An IMDB for creative content and people? Sounds like fun. “So say you’re watching a video online and want to know who created it without having to go to their page, then click on the username, find their original web site/blog or Twitter handle etc etc. That’s where Credictive comes in. In a similar manner to the way Pinterest will tell you where an image was re-pinned from, that’s what Credictive wants to do.”

I’m loving Kickstarter. Check out this project to archive newspaper Web site front pages and make them searchable.

Google Hangouts is now available to everyone. Kind of shocked at how much traction this isn’t getting.

More online records in Utah. “As part of an overall effort by the Utah Department of Commerce to improve citizen access to information, the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing (DOPL) launched an upgraded database that provides scanned copies of disciplinary and non-disciplinary orders levied on licensees. The online records are accessible back to 2005.”

Hotel search engine Room Key has left beta.

TPM on the Google/Safari drama: “Google is reportedly in talks with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the amount of a fine the agency may give the search company for evading the default privacy protections on Apple’s Safari browser, the default Web browser found on all of Apple’s products, from Mac computers to the iPad and iPhone.”

Speaking of Google, last week it mapped Lynn University.

Ever want to learn how to play Fire and Rain? Want James Taylor to teach you? Here you go. Good afternoon, Internet…

So apparently Bing is rolling out a redesigned search results page to give an impression of “overload” on the Google search results page. I swear y’all, this is giving me Altavista/Google flashbacks.

North Carolina Central University Founder James E. Shepard will be the subject of a new digital archive. “The new collection includes Shepard’s correspondence with W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, and other leading Black scholars of the first half of the 20th century.”

Are open SSIDs in decline? I sure hope so…

Twitter is planning to do more with the Discover tab.

Idaho dam debates, now in yummy digital archive flavor.

Ooooo! I can’t wait to get into this archive of New York photographs! Sounds fun.

So apparently Twitter isn’t great at predicting elections. Every time I read a story about using social networks to predict events I remember the thing about how observation changes the item being observed.

IndyCar races… now on YouTube. (There’s also over 40 clips of crashes.)

Want to do some digging? Check out this search engine for seriously obscure adults. This sounds like a cool idea if they can keep it from being spammy. Good morning, Internet…

The city of St. Augustine, Florida is going to get an online historical database of materials dating back to the 16th century. “Materials will include maps and overlays of the city, architectural drawings of historic structures and related government documents from Government House; Spanish documents, transcriptions and English language translations from the St. Augustine Historical Society…”

In case you missed it: Google announced Google Drive last week.

There’s a new tool available for managing invasive plants common to the midwest US.

Oooh, Google Lit Trips! This sounds fun. “Google Lit Trips are free downloadable files that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature on the surface of Google Earth.”

Pinterest now has a Flickr attribution tool. Hopefully more will follow…

The state of Oklahoma has redesigned its Web portal.

John Peel’s record collection has started its online release. Lots of buzz about this one.

A new tool for analyzing words, URLs, hashtags, etc in Twitter — TweetCharts. I gave it a quick try. Looked interesting.

The FCC is going to require TV stations to require posting information about political advertising spending online. “The Federal Communications Commission voted on Friday to require local television stations to put detailed information about political advertising including the cost of specific commercials on their websites.”

Very interesting… a new archive that documents Chinese immigrants in the northwest US. “This document collection includes names, dates and places where the remains of Chinese immigrant workers were systematically dug up across Oregon. This actually was a custom across the American West decades ago. Mostly bachelor Chinese laborers wished for their remains to be returned and reburied in their home villages.”

Gmail now has automatic message translation.

Fascinating… an archive of contemporary wax cylinders. Good morning, Internet…

Wired takes a look at Project Glass from Google. Am I the only one on Earth who doesn’t want these things anywhere near my eyes? I only have two and I don’t want to mess them up.

Wow, these are some crazy Amazon S3 stats. “By the end of the first quarter of 2012, there were 905 billion objects stored, and the service routinely handles 650,000 requests per second for those objects, with peaks that go even higher. To put that in perspective, that’s up from 262 billion objects stored just two years ago and up from 762 billion by Q4 2011.”

Twitter points you to some ways to make the baseball season better via Twitter.

I love to read about digital archives to help preserve dying languages. In this case it’s Arapesh.

WordPress 3.4 — now in beta!

Now available: a database of New Jersey attorneys (over 80,000 of ‘em!) “The database includes the date of admission to the bar, the attorney’s status to practice law in New Jersey, and the county and municipality of the business office of practicing attorneys.”

Hmm… Resultly sounds like fun. “At its core, the stealth social search and notifications service is like ‘Google Alerts for the entire Internet’, he adds, noting that that’s the closest he and his international team come to describing Resultly in a nutshell.” (I thought Google Alerts was Google Alerts for the entire Internet.)

Nice! Open Font Library has a new version.

So excited to read about the massive digitization project at the New York Public Library. “The project, which began in January and will continue through 2014, will digitize documents from the Thomas Addis Emmet Collection, located within the Manuscripts and Archives Division, and almost all the papers of several major American authors in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library.”

Wow: Google Searches Follow Economics. “Web searches by users in countries with higher per capita gross domestic products are more likely to be about the future than the past, a British study found.” Gonna dig into this one a little bit further. (More details in this story.) Good morning, Internet…

Look at you, Amazon, with your cloud full of genomes! “Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN) and the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced at the White House Big Data Summit that the complete 1000 Genomes Project is now available on AWS as a publicly available data set….The project has grown to 200 terabytes of genomic data including DNA sequenced from more than 1,700 individuals that researchers can now access on AWS for use in disease research. “

Baseball fans are finally going to get Negro League Statistics. The bad news this is six years after the project was “finished” (data is still being gathered.) The stats are great. The delay is awful!

Thailand — now on Google Maps Street View.

Facebook Photos! Now higher resolution and full screen (nice!)

One of the problems with doing ResearchBuzz is that I find out about Marcel Breuer via the Marcel Breuer digital archive blog post, I look him up on Wikipedia, and down the rabbit hole I go… good evening, Internet…