To start this afternoon’s buzz, here’s a story from The Economist that really steams my beans, grinds my gears, and beltsands my last nerve. Newspapers are lobbying for more protection from Google because the search engine’s indexing allgedly harms their business. “Giving away the headline and first sentence of an article supposedly dissuades readers from clicking through to the newspaper’s website to read the entire story.” Hey newspapers? If that’s true, your’re doing a bloody terrible job.

Speaking of things that get on nerves, Facebook is apparently testing sound notifications and the testers already hate it. When I get a message on Facebook, my phone makes a noise that I privately think of as “Ate a bad burrito tone,” so I can see how this would not go over well.

I had so much going on Friday I missed Firefox’s birthday. Happy 8th birthday Firefox.

I adore Robert Scoble in a old southern woman non-ironic “bless your heart” kind of way. Don’t tell him I said so. Anyway, I like his posts, he has really gotten me thinking about Facebook lists, and he has a great sense of history. But I think he’s wrong when he talks about the war on noise. It seems to me he misses two points: 1) Noise is subjective. What he considers noise might be what I consider fabulous. And I don’t trust Facebook to make that distinction (sorry Facebook.) 2) There are opportunities to filter information in automated ways that don’t require the service to make content-filtering decisions for you. Worldc.am is a great example of this, filtering Instagram by location. I think it’s a thousand times better to develop meaningful, user-defined and understood filters based on measurable elements (keyword, location, hastag, etc.) than to trust arbitrary filtering systems from a content provider.

Tweetro has become a victim of Twitter’s token limit.

Archives.com has a roundup of new collections available (covering Massachusetts, Michigan, and Nevada.)

The FBI has launched a new Science and Technology Branch Web site.

Hat tip to Genealogy Insider for the blog post about The National Archives of Ireland new genealogy site.

Mozilla has launched Popcorn Maker, a new tool for remixing video. “Popcorn Maker makes it easy to enhance, remix and share web video. Using Popcorn Maker’s simple drag and drop interface, you can add live content to any video — photos, maps, links, social media feeds and more. All right from your browser.” Sounds fun!

How to Geek has an extensive article on favorite RSS feed readers. Personally I use RSSOwl and Liferea and Google Reader and Feeddler Pro. Why yes, I am pathetic, thank you for asking. Good afternoon, Internet…