Nice! HijackThis has been released as open source.

A new exhibit based on scrapbooks of African-American life by L.S. Alexander Gumby: “Now, examples from his life’s work are available online on the Unwritten History: Alexander Gumby’s African America website, which has digital reproductions of more than 60 pages from his scrapbooks.” (He did 161 scrapbooks total. Wow!)

Google, now with more privacy issues. “While one Google team was taking advantage of a little-known backdoor that could change the default Safari setting, the Google Chrome team was working to get Apple to close the backdoor–apparently with neither team having knowledge of the other’s actions.”

I didn’t even know that there WERE fifty thousand beers, much less that there was a database app for them.

Old article but still interesting: Five low-profile startups that could change the face of big data.

Search Engine Land takes a look at Volunia.

Vimeo has added Creative Commons browse and search capabilities.

Code Hero sounds like a great Kickstarter project.

Wondering about Pinterest? Here’s a 57-slide deck. Need an invite? Send me your e-mail address and I’ll send you one.

Handy: Five easy ways to find cheap gas. Good morning, Internet…

China has published a national bribery blacklist.

Whoopsie! Google.com was accidentally getting flagged as malware.

I know someone who will be very interested in this new archive about Polynesian voyaging. “If he had known what a complex undertaking it would be, Nainoa Thompson says now, he might not have asked Honolulu Community College to create a digital library of documents related to the Polynesian Voyaging Society.”

A new search engine oriented toward privacy: Stealth.

Heh, applying Google PageRank to chemistry: “Aurora Clark, an associate professor of chemistry at Washington State University, has adapted Google’s PageRank software to create moleculaRnetworks, which scientists can use to determine molecular shapes and chemical reactions without the expense, logistics and occasional danger of lab experiments.”

The new version of Twitter (the new new version of Twitter) has been rolled out for everybody.

Can’t get to Arizona? Now there’s virtual Arizona!

Ancestry is offering free access to its Japanese internment camp record collections from now through February 23.

Wow: a very interesting Civil War diary published: “Diaries belonging to a Civil War soldier who witnessed the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln have been digitized and published by UC Merced’s Kolligian Library.”

A new Web site provides information on New Jersey’s same-day surgery centers.

New Web site looks at Canada during the First and Second World Wars: “Wartime Canada is an online database that preserves historical Canadian documents from those wars and makes them accessible to the public….There are 400 documents online and an additional 3,000 to 4,000 to be uploaded in the coming months, with new material being added every day…”

Some amazing pictures: how Japan has rebuilt and cleaned up in the 11 months since the earthquake and tsunami. Astounding. Good morning, Internet…

Google Maps: trouble in France.

TextPipe is now version 9.0. Sigh… love TextPipe.

The 2010 Mexico Earthquake: a 3-D map study of before and after.

The EPA has released a new tool for tracking greenhouse gases.

Bowdoin’s student body talks about mass deactivation of Facebook. “Last Monday, Tyler Patton ’12 and Ruiqi Tang ’13 launched massdeactivation.blogspot.com, the site of their self-proclaimed ‘social experiment’ that urges Bowdoin students to disable their Facebook profiles from February 8 to March 8.”

Hey! The UK Supreme Court has a Twitter account.

Oo! Awesome Archives! What an awesome Tumblr!

Remember the book The Long Tail? Now it’s a free online comic.

Twitter is going to https by default. Good for them.

Google Wallet, hacked again. WOW.

Meanwhile, Google is laying fiber in Kansas City.

The British Library is going to start archiving video game Web sites! So cool. So when I’m still playing Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom fifty years from now, I’ll have a place to find hints.

The University of Iowa has launched an online archive of university yearbooks. The 100 yearbooks cover 1892-1992.

Interesting thoughts: Why Apple should start its own search engine.

I think Tennessee Steampunk would be a great name for a band, how about you? Good morning, Internet…

Fipeo, a new video social network. The article describes it like this: “People with complementary interests find that video and respond in kind. Connection are formed and the new acquaintances carry on the relationship.” Sadly I can imagine this getting real weird (in a negative way) real quick….

Nice! The Montana State Library and its digitization effort.

The IRS has a new online tool to help low- and moderate- income tax payers find prep help. “The new tool, available 24 hours a day on IRS.gov, makes it easier than ever for qualified individuals to find free help through the IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. Volunteers at VITA locations generally offer tax preparation for people with incomes of $50,000 or less free of charge.”

Interesting. A database of software made in Australia and New Zealand. Already over 100 entries.

Followup: the Pentagon Press Secretary and the Twitter Town Hall.

The 2012 Republican Convention has an official Twitter account. (Please note that I am including this for informative purposes, not as an endorsement. Don’t expect an endorsement unless the Silly Party has a convention….)

There’s a great blog that covers “forgotten” movies, as well as weekly DVD releases of old movies from Warner. Check it out at
http://forgottenfilmcast.wordpress.com/. Good stuff.

Twitter breaks down the Superbowl tweet numbers. “…in 2008, Twitter’s largest spike in Tweets per second (TPS) during the Super Bowl was just 27. Three years later, fans sent 4,064 TPS, which was the highest TPS for any sporting event at that time. This year, the TPS peak was 12,233 Tweets.”

Lady Gaga is launching her own social network. Closed beta. Good morning, Internet…

Speaking of Google Earth, the ocean terrain in Google Earth has received a major update. “Through several rounds of upgrades, Google Earth now has 15 percent of the seafloor image derived from shipboard soundings at 1-kilometer resolution. Previous versions only derived about 10 percent of their data from ship soundings and the rest from depths predicted by Sandwell and NOAA researcher Walter Smith using satellite gravity measurement.”

Speaking of maps, a new mapping initiative from the NYPL.

Wow, a 1917 film (19 minutes long!) covering a construction project in San Francisco is now online.

Coming soon — an online archive of letters from the 1860s.

From the New York Times: a new database of hazardous building materials. Though from the article it seems like we’ll be down to building with mud and sticks….

A tool for reading Google Books offline: GooReader.

Ooo! What a lovely archive of Japanese woodblock prints!

Resource: seven alternatives to Google Analytics.

This should be fun: “The Library of Congress and France’s national audio-visual archive announced plans Wednesday to exchange up to 500 hours of digitized film and TV shows that reflect how the United States and France have portrayed each other in media.” Will this include Deux-Deux from The Inspector?

A new online database of herbs is coming from the University of Lethbridge. “Photos of 21,000 plant specimens are being digitized and will be available online, complete with scientific name, location, collection time, phenology and habitat.”

Sierra Leone has launched a new online mining database. “The purpose of the system is to have information on all revenue data for the country’s extractive industry – payments made for licenses, royalties, and contributions to local chiefdoms – collected, recorded and published for public accessibility.”

A new archive for Asian recipes. Domo Kun chocolate-covered marshmallows for the win. Good afternoon, Internet…

Interesting: a new Google search tool called Don’t be Evil.

Also interesting: a tool to calculate the cost of living abroad.

Some members of Congress have some questions about Google’s new privacy policy.

Huh, I didn’t know the White House was on Storify.

The oral histories of Yorkshire, will be digitized.

The UN has launched a new database to help businesses adapt to climate change.

About.com has launched a free cooking app.

A very article on vector images: where to find them and resources for editing them. Good morning, Internet…

This collection is a bit too small to be one I’d normally cover, but when Harvard announced it last week I found the pictures to be compelling, and wanted to make sure you knew about it. The new collection is called the Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection, and it features 543 photos taken by Artamonoff between 1935 and 1945, at sites (archaelogical sites, and ruins) in Istanbul and western Turkey. The collection is available at http://icfa.doaks.org/collections/artamonoff/items.

The photographs can be browsed in toto, via a map, via a tag cloud, or with a keyword search. I looked at the tag cloud and chose brickwork, for which I got 61 results.

The pictures are presented in a grid with location, thumbnail, and brief description. The individual item pages show larger pictures (but I wish they could be larger, I feel like I missed a lot of detail), date taken, more extensive description, and in many places a Google Map so you can get an idea of what the area looks like now. The announcement of this collection notes that a lot of these sites and monuments have fallen into disrepair or have vanished completely.

In addition to the photographs, there is also a biography of the photographer and a list of sites where the pictures were taken.

I have no idea why these images resonate with me so much. They seem almost haunted, but at the same time they occupy a landscape that is determined to be ordinary (note the imposing exterior of the St. Mary Pammakaristos, before its restoration, with what looks like a string of laundry in the foreground. I’m not much of a critic in these matters but I think it might also be that Artamonoff was a pretty damn good photographer — he was able to take both detailed and long-range pictures without losing any context.

The collection is small enough to browse; if the images themselves were larger this collection would be absolutely incredible. As it is it is well worth a visit if you’re at all interested in history or archaelogy.

Hey, The White House is on Google+!

Google Operating System takes a look at searching Google for punctuation marks and other special symbols.

GOS also notes that you can still find Google Code Search… you just have to know where to look.

The state of Maryland has created an online database of business incentives. “… an online database of the financial incentives that the state provides to companies when they promise to create jobs, open new facilities or otherwise contribute to the economy.”

Wow! A huge roundup of new APIs from ProgrammableWeb.

Congressional Facebook Hackathon: the report.

Archives.com has added a bunch of vital records.

News on Ireland’s national library going digital.

Check out Apple’s press release on its new offerings.

Who’s going to team up with National Geographic for a digital archive? Why, it’s Gale! Good morning, Internet…

Arizona State University announced last week the launch (no pun intended) of the new Project Gemini Online Digital Archive, an online archive of NASA’s Gemini spacecraft flights. (From the announcement: “Project Gemini (1964-1966) was the second United States human spaceflight program, after Project Mercury (1960-1963). The overarching goal was to test systems and operations critical to the Apollo program (1961-1975), conceived with the purpose of ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’.” The archive is available at http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/.

from the front page you’ll see that there’s already an archive for Project Mercury. The Gemini gallery is divided by each of the ten missions, from Gemini III to Gemini XII. I looked at the Gemini VII archive. The pictures here were presented in a slideshow, black and white pictures first. Most of the pictures were shots of Earth, some with captions (“India, Madras State, Ceylon, Adam’s Bridge, Palk Straits”) and some without. All of them had downloads available, from low resolution to the raw image (the one I downloaded was a 58MB .TIF)

If you look at the top nav bar for the image gallery, you’ll see a pulldown menu called Gemini. This menu will give you background on the missions, information about the images and how they were processed, and a short list of more resources about the Gemini missions. There’s also a link to a page of “movies” — highlights of the best pictures from each mission made into Quicktime movies. This is probably the best way to get all the image highlights.

Unless you know a lot more about astronomy than I do, start with the background and the movies before going in for an archive browse. A great collection but I needed more context to get started enjoying it.