NEW RESOURCES

Twitter and the government of India have teamed up.

Algerie Telecom has launched Nooonbooks (yes, three o’s), a new digital library of 30,000 books in Arabic. “The digital library “Nooonbooks” comprises over 30,000 books on exact sciences, management, social sciences, law, personal development and general knowledge. Nooonbooks is available by annual subscription priced at DZD 2,400 via one-year licence cards.” (I believe that’s about $25 a year USD.)

Dumfries and Galloway’s Library and Archive Service has launched an online image archive. “Collection highlights include a postcard of the German air ship the Hindenberg over Drummore, the Lusitania off the coast of Galloway, the Queen Mother at Park Farm in Dumfries, JM Barrie with the cast of the Duke of Christmas Daisies and the Burns Statue inauguration in Dumfries in 1882.” Looks like about 3400 items at the moment, with more being added regularly.

New York Police Department crime scene photos will be digitized and put online. “The trove includes well-known scenes, like the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan shortly after Malcolm X was assassinated there in 1965, and exploded lockers at Pennsylvania Station from one of the many attacks in the 16-year rampage in the 1940s and 1950s of George P. Metesky, the so-called Mad Bomber.”

USEFUL STUFF

Heh: How to enjoy Twitter without working yourself into a frothing rage. (Why would you follow someone you don’t like?)

From Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 22 Chrome Apps Every Teacher Should Know About.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Twitter is testing an offensive tweet filter. “Revealed in a tweet posted Monday by ThinkUp CEO and blogger Anil Dash, the feature known as ‘quality filtering’ is intended to ‘remove all Tweets from your notifications timeline that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content, or are sent from suspicious accounts.’ The feature appears as an option on the iOS app’s Notifications screen, where you can turn it on or off.” This new feature is being tested with some of Twitter’s verified users, and not joyless proles like you or me. Well, me anyway.

Twitter is also testing a new suggestion feature. “Spotted today by Marketing Land editor in chief Matt McGee, the ‘You may also like’ feature shows up in the right-rail on some individual tweet pages. It shows several tweets, some related to the content of the main tweet, some not. With the small sample-size — we saw the display on four of 10 tweets we checked — it wasn’t possible to see a pattern.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

MIT Technology Review has an interesting article on fake media accounts in the social media world. If you’ve spent any time on Twitter you’ve probably seen them.

Interesting: How one university archive (Princeton) uses Tumblr. “The design of our Tumblr page reflects what I wanted to convey: Yes, we’re a special collections library with a lot of old stuff, but it’s cool old stuff. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re not always going to try to teach you about the storied history of Princeton—although you will get a sense of that if you keep reading for a while. Instead, like the Comedy Central show, Drunk History, we show you the things that make those of us who work in the archives laugh. Along the way, we also tell the story of Princeton in bits and pieces in a format we hope is entertaining and visually appealing.”

Bing may remove navigation to additional pages of search results past the first. “Bing may drop their paginated search results for some search queries where they are confident that page one of the search results are ‘the most relevant results’ for the query.” One of the commenters to the story said Bing has been doing this for years, but I’d never seen it before – maybe I’ve never searched for something obscure enough? This is a really terrible idea.

Facebook is apparently in talks with news sites to host their content. Unfortunately I don’t have enough adjectives to express what an insufferably stupid idea I think this is. Good morning, Internet…

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