USEFUL STUFF

From Poynter: 5 Ways Newsrooms Can Make the Most of Instagram. A lot of these could apply to museums and other cultural institutions as well.

Google Operating System shares some tips for searching YouTube.

Genealogists! Here’s a MOOC you might want to know about. “RootsMOOC [Massive Open Online Course] is a free, open, online course and a friendly introduction to family history research in the U.S. using commonly available sources. The staff at the State Library of North Carolina’s Government and Heritage Library will help you learn about the most useful sources, tools, and techniques for getting your research off the ground. By the time you’re finished with this course, you’ll have a good start on your own genealogy research and you will know how and where to keep digging.”

Google has launched a new storage service for cold data. “Cold data is often kept for legal or regulatory reasons, so the service is clearly designed with businesses in mind. The new platform, called Google Cloud Storage Nearline, costs just $0.01 per GB at rest each month.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Calendar is now available as an iPhone app.

Bing wants to help you build your NCAA tourney bracket. “Want to come out on top with your bracket? We’re here to help. We know that as much as we all love basketball, we don’t have time to follow all 68 teams. In fact, according to a YouGov survey commissioned by Bing, most of us only follow 1-2 teams in the regular season. That means we can’t all be experts and nearly 40 percent of us simply guess when filling out a bracket. Don’t worry, Bing is here to level the playing field for the average fan and make you look like that smart sports analyst.”

Yahoo has launched on-demand password authentication (PRESS RELEASE). “Today, at SXSW, Yahoo announced a new intuitive option for users to login to their account without any need for a password. Upon sign in, an on-demand password is texted directly to a user’s mobile phone.”

Google Code is going away.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Is Nest getting into audio? “Smart home gadget maker Nest is looking for someone to lead what they are calling Nest Audio, fueling speculation that they are moving into speakers and other audio products. The company declined to comment on the new division or job listing.” That could also mean it’s getting into home security, yes?

The FTC has released its 2014 complaints report. “The top five complaint categories consisted of identity theft (332,646 complaints, or about 13 percent of the total), debt collection (280,998, or about 11 percent), imposter scams (276,622, or about 11 percent), telephone and mobile services (171,809 or about 7 percent), and banks and lenders (128,107, or about 5 percent).”

Bing is teaming up with the NCAA for March Madness. “As part of this partnership, NCAA has pulled 10 years of raw historical data about teams, tournaments, win loss ratio, home vs. away stats, etc. and provided it to Microsoft’s Walter Sun, principal applied science manager, to analyze and review. After culling through the information, running through Bing’s algorithms and leveraging machine learning, Walter and his team have been able to identify key patterns over the years that contribute to a team’s success.”

Apple has launched beta testing for iOS 8.3 — but it’s invitation only.

Google has launched an online store for hardware. “The store, which debuted on Wednesday, coincides with the launch of Google’s new Chromebook Pixel laptop. Other hardware for sale include the Nexus tablet line, the Nexus Player streaming box, Chromecast, Nest thermostats, Android-powered smartwatches and a variety of accessories.”

Is Snapchat going to team up with sports leagues for live broadcasting?

The FCC has published its Net Neutrality rules. All 400 pages of them.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Interesting! What a graph of 8000 fake Twitter accounts looks like.

History Today has an interesting article on footnotes vs. permalinks. “…it turns out that a much more insidious development is coming closer to undermining the footnote: the use of web citations. Historians, like all other academics, increasingly embed URLs (web addresses) in their footnotes. This is of necessity – their source may well be available on the Internet alone. But this practice presumes that Internet sources are as permanent as evidence on paper. We all seem to believe that if something is on the web it will stay there, as it would in a library. In fact this is far from true – the web is inherently unstable. Internet citations decay, become inaccessible, disappear.” Good morning, Internet…

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