morningbuzz

Whisper, TwitPic, BBC, More: Morning Buzz, October 19th, 2014

Hey! Use Google Sheets to have multi-lingual chats. From Amit Agarwal, of course.

FamilySearch keeps adding those records. “States. Notable collection updates include the 2,694,665 images from the Slovakia, Church and Synagogue Books, 1592-1910, collection; the 2,785,409 images from the US, New Jersey, State Census, 1915, collection; and the 2,155,570 indexed records from the US, Ohio, County Death Records, 1840-2001, collection.”

The ALA has archived its Ebola Webinar and made it available online.

Google is rolling out another search update in an attempt to downrank sites containing pirated content. “The update will also affect search autofill behavior to prevent sites with pirated content from appearing in results. Furthermore, “legitimate” media sites like Netflix, Amazon, and Google Play will be prioritized to the top of Google’s results page when users search for a particular movie, TV show, or song.”

Do you use Whisper? Do you think it keeps your posts completely safe and anonymous? You might want to rethink that. “The company behind Whisper, the social media app that promises users anonymity and claims to be ‘the safest place on the internet’, is tracking the location of its users, including some who have specifically asked not to be followed. The practice of monitoring the whereabouts of Whisper users – including those who have expressly opted out of geolocation services – will alarm users, who are encouraged to disclose intimate details about their private and professional lives. Whisper is also sharing information with the US Department of Defense gleaned from smartphones it knows are used from military bases, and developing a version of its app to conform with Chinese censorship laws.”

A huge fanzine collection is getting digitized.

Is. Isn’t. Is. For reals. Twitpic is shutting down. You have until October 25th to get your pics.

Are parents going to be held accountable for what their kids do on Facebook?

The Internet Archive now has a map of book subjects. Wooooooow. “The relationship data for this map has been generated by first retrieving all the tags of the Internet Archive’s images on flickr and then connecting those subjects which appear together on an image. The resulting similarity matrix has been processed using the t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) technique which groups topics by the strength of their relationship. In the last step the layout gets cleaned up automatically so that no text blocks overlap.” When I tried this it was kludgy, but as an indicator of what might be possible I really like it.

Twitter will now show you tweets from people you don’t follow. Because marketing. And because famous people don’t have enough outlets to get their faces all up in your face. Blah.

The BBC will start keeping a public log of articles removed under “Right to be Forgotten.”

Snapchat will soon have advertising. Good morning, Internet…

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