afternoonbuzz

Pinterest, Government, Notey, More: Evening Buzz, February 17th, 2015

From Mashable: How to get the most out of Pinterest’s Guided Search.

From Best of the Business Web (Robert Berkman): Facebook as a personal research source.

Amy S. dropped me a note to let me know the British Newspaper Archive has reached 10 million pages. It is a paid resource, but the subscription price is currently £9.95 month (that’s a bit over $15 US.)

Google has launched a Chinese version of its YouTube channel for developers. “The channel is on YouTube — which will mean it gets disrupted by China’s censorship system, unless viewers use a (stable) VPN — and includes videos from the main developers channel with Chinese subtitles, as well as original content in Mandarin.”

Google Glass lives on with lively development in medical and industry: developing a Google Lens. “…the view users have with Google Glass has one drawback, [Jibo] He says. Its webcam has a narrow visual field of 54.8 degrees horizontally and 42.5 degrees vertically. The narrow field of view limits Google Glass’ usefulness for some applications. Enter Google Lens, which expands the device’s view by 58 percent horizontally (to 109.8 degrees) and 34 percent vertically (to 57.8 degrees).”

It used the be that the best way for page posts on Facebook to get organic reach was via photos. Not any more! “Looking at more than 670,000 posts by 4,445 brand pages (not including celebrity, entertainment or media pages) between October 2014 and February 2015, Socialbakers found that video posts had organic reach of 8.71%, meaning an average of nearly nine fans out of 100 see such posts. The reach was only 3.73% for photo posts, well below the results for text-only statuses (5.77%) and link posts (5.29%).”

Google has changed its bug disclosure policy after recent kerfuffles with Microsoft and Apple. “Project Zero will not now count US public holidays in the 90-day countdown, and will offer companies actively working on a fix a 14-day ‘grace period’ after the cut off.”

The United States will be releasing indexes of federal data. “On Friday, the Sunlight Foundation received a letter from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) outlining how they plan to comply with our FOIA request from December 2013 for agency Enterprise Data Inventories. EDIs are comprehensive lists of a federal agency’s information holdings, providing an unprecedented view into data held internally across the government. Our FOIA request was submitted 14 months ago. These lists of the government’s data were not public, however, until now. More than a year after Sunlight’s FOIA request and with a lawsuit initiated by Sunlight about to be filed, we’re finally going to see what data the government holds.”

I love hearing about topic-based blog directories getting funding. “Notey, a Hong Kong-based startup that wants to help internet users discover more original content and blogs, has closed a $1.6 million seed round to build out its service….The service itself is akin to an RSS reader at first glance, but with an emphasis on discovery and curation — and a really slick design. The likes of Feedly and co provide a place for users to read their favorite websites and blogs, but Notey is an option if you don’t necessary know what you want. The service showcases content using more than 500,000 curated topics. Users can select those that they like, read sources within them or pull them into their home-screen for easy access.” Good evening, Internet…

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