The first alpha for Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has been released.

Hey, Google got a Solstice doodle!

Here’s your vocabulary word of the day: screenshort. “Essentially, it’s a chunk of text, screen-shotted, and embedded in a tweet. It’s become an extremely popular way to share a passage from a story. You could call it a Tweetcap, maybe. But I’m going with Screenshort.”

The Museum of London is asking for crowd help in transcribing Victorian-era guides to London. “This website displays the elevation views of 35 of the guides (from the West End) and we would like your help in transcribing the business directories. Help us create the first searchable business directory of early Victorian London that includes street views.”

Google is now showing song lyrics in its search results. From the article: “It is all part of Google’s swiss army knife toolbox to screw publishers and help searchers.” Geez, Barry. This quote sounds slightly better in context if you read the “Swiss Army Knife” article. But only slightly.

The GIF IT UP competition winners have been announced. Love the dancing couple.

Fascinating stuff from MIT: How information moves between cultures. “By analyzing data on multilingual Twitter users and Wikipedia editors and on 30 years’ worth of book translations in 150 countries, researchers at MIT, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Aix Marseille University have developed network maps that they say represent the strength of the cultural connections between speakers of different languages.”

From Six Revisions: the top ten free online RSS readers. What, no NewsBlur? Good list though. I really do like Digg’s reader.

If you don’t want to track Santa with Google you can also do it with Bing. Good morning, Internet…

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