From the Telegraph: the five best Web sites to learn a language for free.

Half of the research papers released in 2011 are free to read online? That seems high, but if it’s correct it’s great news. “The proportion of free online papers is likely to increase in the next few years. The European Commission says that, from 2014, the results of all research funded by the European Union must be open access. And in February, the US White House announced that government-funded research should be made free to read within 12 months of publication. Federal agencies are due to submit their plans for achieving this to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy by 22 August.”

Yahoo’s sites got more visitors than Google’s sites in July, the first time that has happened since 2011. This is not a case of Yahoo beating Google in search – Google’s still got a lock on search engine dominance. I’m pretty sure that all these vistors are in fact on Yahoo News complaining about the Dear Abby columns.

Facebook has expanded its embedded post feature to everyone. Now you too can embed a public Facebook post on your own Web site.

Jim Stroud has an interesting article on a specialized Google News search: to find a job!

There’s a new open source social network available with a strong privacy focus. “Trsst was built as an alternative to today’s social media and blogging platforms, which not only cede to every whim of government content inspection, but can also reverse course on content ownership policy and feature development to tighten control over the service experience (remember Twitter’s API lockdown last July?)”

UNC researchers have created a new tool that works with WordPress to let educators make extensive, media-rich Web sites. “The new tool, called the Digital Humanities Toolkit or DH Press, provides a way for historians, researchers, teachers and others to create interactive websites, virtual tours, data maps and multimedia archives with a WordPress platform. It also organizes data in more easily searchable and intuitive ways, such as mapping.”

Bing has launched Bing Schools, an initiative to bring ad-free, filtered search results to students. It’s currently in pilot mode.

You know, there are so many announcements of archives of Northern Albanian burial mounds that I just can’t get to them all. So I have to choose just one… kidding aside, I liked Ms. Deskaj’s approach and where she’s planning to go next with her archive. “While my project is not meant to be theoretically enlightening, it is, however, a methodological experiment in how to best present regional archaeological data to various local stakeholders. Using TileMill and MapBox, I spatially plotted each tumulus (burial mound) and provided photographs and select information for each one. I attempted to create an interactive map whereby a site visitor could click on a point, which would then direct them to a new page with information about that tumulus. … The next challenge, however, will be to figure out how to make these data even more accessible – in other words, I need to figure out how to convert these data into linked open data. Linked open data will nest Tumulus data within larger, connected systems that will allow people to easily search for (and use) the data from my site.”

YAY! IFTTT has restored Twitter triggers! Good morning, Internet…