morningbuzz

LOC, Fonts, Tweets, More: Tuesday Buzz, May 6, 2014

This is a very, very tough week at work, so updates will be sparse.

From Quartz: Why LinkedIn is Morphing from a Social Network into an Online Newspaper. “While more than 300 million people have joined, LinkedIn’s most recent filings suggest that the number of people who log in at least once a month is probably closer to 200 million. Growth in US monthly desktop users and desktop pageviews both slipped into negative territory last year (though visitors from mobile are climbing).”

The Los Angeles Police Department has a new tool for crowdsourcing photo and video evidence. “Called the Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository (LEEDIR), the web, Android and iOS apps serve as a direct line, and central repository for user-generated evidence.”

Google has purchased Rangespan. “Google has made another move to build out its e-commerce business, and specifically its retail portal Google Shopping. It has acquired Rangespan, a London-based provider of back office services for online retailers, using data science to help them expand their product selection based on real-time sales dynamics.”

Now apparently Bing is testing non-underlined hyperlinks in its search results. I find this irritating but it might be because I’m old.

Heartbleed not scary enough for you? Okay, try this on: a serious security flaw in OAuth and OpenID. “The vulnerability could allow an attacker to redirect the “token” used by OAuth 2.0 to access user information on a third-party site, making it possible to steal information such as the email address, age, or location of a user, the blog says. In OpenID, the vulnerability could enable attackers to collect user’s information directly.”

Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, have raised $160 million. Woo hoo! Ice cream on WordPress!

Mashable covers Prototypo, an online tool that lets anyone design fonts. “The application currently exists in beta, but Babé and co-founder Yannick Mathey are at work on Prototypo 1.0. In the beta version, users start with one of four basic fonts they can then modify using parameters such as thickness, aperture (negative space) and roundness. Serifs can be fine-tuned separately. The final version will include more than 25 adjustable options.”

The Library of Congress has a new blog. “‘Now See Hear!’ gives our specialists in the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center a place to showcase some of the amazing treasures of our national audiovisual heritage.”

The New LA Times design apparently wants to prechew your reading by offering “sharelines” at the top of each article that you can send as tweets. Apparently this is supported by research or something but dammit, if I give enough of a crap to post something on Twitter, I give enough of a crap to make up a tweet myself.

From Robin Good, a huge list of online collaboration tools (over 350!)

Fast Company has an article about an app that lets Twitter users watermark their photos.

YouTube is now offering a intro video option. Three seconds!

Can studying Twitter data provide more accurate information about earthquakes? “Reza Zadeh, a lecturer at the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University, along with two PhD candidates, found that including data pulled from user tweets alongside traditional earthquake measurement data resulted in more accurate ShakeMaps than those without the Twitter data.”

MakeUseOf breaks down 7 online course sites.

Routledge is making a selection of its humanities monographs free through the end of May. Good morning, Internet…

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