NEW RESOURCES

Interesting! The entire French Civil Code – dating back to Napoleon – is now on… GitHub? “The benefits of using GitHub, rather than going to the French government’s own online hub of the civil code, is the ability to track changes. For example, France legalized gay marriage in 2013 and the law can be tracked on Morin’s Git here. In many ways, it is a more logical and user-friendly way to track the changes to laws over time—in a similar spirit, developers have put the federal laws of Germany and the US on GitHub as well.”

Perhaps not new, but new to me: a ridiculously huge archive of late-70s, 80s, and 90s 12″ dance mixes. Boogie oogie oogie.

The US will be working with Japan to digitize its A-bomb research. “Japanese and American experts are exploring ways to put the data archives of a study on A-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki online. While there are privacy concerns to overcome, providing digital access to the archives is expected to deepen public understanding of the history of the U.S. radiation impact study by allowing researchers and others in Japan and elsewhere to examine the documents without having to travel to the United States.”

A copy of The Divine Comedy from the 14th century has been digitized and put online.

USEFUL STUFF

From History Today: The best history apps. I think Esther S. hipped me to this. Thanks E!

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Pinterest has launched a new “pin-it” button.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Is Wikipedia taking a hit in Google’s organic search?. This article at SEO Round Table notes that some people are observing Wikipedia pages have dropped in search results. If this is the case, it would be mean that Google is scraping Wikipedia to put information in its knowledge graphs, then shoving the actual Wikipedia pages down in the search results, which would be icky. I tried search with several different names and topics, and in all the ones I saw the Wikipedia pages still came out on top. So I don’t know…

So where do you test self-driving cars? In a robot city. Duh.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Stone Temple did an experiment: Does Google sniff e-mails for URLs? The answer is “apparently not”… Good afternoon, Internet…

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