morningbuzz

Houses, DPLA, Piano Rolls, More: Saturday Morning Buzz, April 19, 2014

Danny Sullivan has been covering search for 18 years! Danny is a terrific guy and I’m so glad he’s still active in this space. The first edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research was published in 1996 so I guess I’ve been covering search for 18 years, too!

Wow, this could be really useful. A new tool shows the renovation history of houses listed on Realtor.com. “The Porch Home and Neighborhood Report, which is available on Realtor.com, typically includes home-improvement projects, costs, photos and the names of the contractors who worked on the house. The information is pulled from city permit departments, materials suppliers, professional associations, real-estate agents and homeowners.”

Yikes! According to research, one in three Android apps on third-party sites is in some way malicious. “[Opswat] downloaded almost 12,000 app files from various sources of Android apps other than the official Google Play store, and loaded them into their proprietary anti-malware system Metascan, which flagged 32% of the apps as suspicious.” I’d take that with a little salt because some of those marked as having malware actually had adware, which is annoying but not as bad as malware. But on the other hand… third party sites… ? Does that include, say, Amazon’s app store?

Facebook has released a new version of its Paper app. It looks interesting but I find Nuzzel much more useful (and it’s out of beta and open to anyone who wants to sign up!)

The Digital Public Library of America is celebrating its 1st anniversary by announcing six new partners: the California Digital Library, the Connecticut Digital Archive, the US Government Printing Office, Indiana Memory, the Montana Memory Project, and The J. Paul Getty Trust.

LinkedIn now has 300 million members.

Interesting: you can now subscribe to Google Trends. That is, get them delivered to your e-mail box. “You can now ‘Subscribe’ to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart.”

And in the “is anybody really surprised” department, we have this: “…data from Megaupload’s database shared with TorrentFreak shows that employees of MPAA and RIAA member companies had hundreds of accounts at the file-storage site…. In total, there were 490 Megaupload accounts that were connected to MPAA and RIAA members, who sent 181 premium payments in total. Together, these users uploaded 16,455 files which are good for more than 2,097 gigabytes in storage.” Read the whole article here. Motes and eyes, anyone?

8 Digital Tools Every Journalist Should Try. I had not heard of most of these.

A little outside my purview, but SO COOL, and hey, it’s Saturday: Transcribing piano rolls with Python. Good morning, Internet…

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