Coming soon: a site for crowdsourced reporting. “Brown Moses, the self-taught British journalist who has become an expert at using YouTube, Facebook and other social media to verify information about the ongoing war in Syria, has been talking for some time about his plans to launch a site that would help expand what he does and teach others to do the same. On Tuesday, Moses — whose real name is Eliot Higgins — provided a few more details about what he has planned, as well as a name for the new venture: Bellingcat.”

Three cheers to Saundra F. for the article about official documents of Minnesota being digitized. Thanks Saundra! “The effort by the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office and the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library categorized and digitized about 40,000 documents, dating from 1900 to 1990, including executive orders, extraditions, and oaths of office.”

Another excellent find from Robin Good: Walkhub. “WalkHub is a free, open-source web app which allows you to record, publish and share walkthroughs of apps, services, web tools and forms by recording your interactions.”

Trivia + Google Maps = Smarty Pins. You can try it at http://smartypins.withgoogle.com/ .

More Google: it has discontinued all its Q&A services.

Microsoft has boosted encryption for OneDrive and Outlook.com.

Apparently Facebook’s Terms of Service were updated to include “research” four months after the actual emotional manipulation study. In addition, the study may have included users under 18.

The state of Nebraska is the first to digitize homestead records. (Hat tip Genealogy Blog.)

Yikes! The WordPress plugin MailPoet is really bad news. “Websites that run WordPress and MailPoet, a plugin with more than 1.7 million downloads, are susceptible to hacks that give attackers almost complete control, researchers have warned.” Good afternoon, Internet..

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