afternoonbuzz

Saturday Afternoon Buzz, April 11, 2015

NEW RESOURCES

The Hoover Institution has released a new iPad app (PRESS RELEASE). “The launch of the app concludes a comprehensive process, which helped identify what Hoover followers most care about in terms of content, research and access to ideas. The app contains tens of thousands of pieces of content organized so that information can be found and discovered in a logical and intuitive fashion, no matter the topic or media format. The simplified menu and filtering tools improve ease of use by incorporating restructured and streamlined research topics. For visitors looking for a specific item, a robust search engine quickly finds content to match the keywords.”

USEFUL STUFF

TechCrunch has a writeup on Clearbit, which tells you about the person behind an e-mail address.

A HUGE list from Hongkiat: 80 Twitter tools for almost everything.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The FTC is investigating a complaint against Google’s YouTube app for kids. “A number of consumer advocacy groups sent a letter to the FTC Tuesday, asking for an investigation into Google’s YouTube Kids app. The groups allege the app includes ads that deceive its young users in ways that violate the FTC’s policies on how products can be marketed to children.”

More Google: Google Moderator is shutting down at the end of July.

Is Google going to launch its own program for finding home service providers? “One would suspect this would be deeply integrated into Google My Business, where small businesses can advertise through AdWords based on the type of business they are in and the query the searcher enters into the search box. So plumbers in Google My Business may be able to set a budget to show up for plumbing related keywords and then be connected to the searcher, potentially without even having a web site.”

Apparently rumors are flying that someone’s going to buy Twitter – possibly Google. Blah – don’t like that combination at all. Facebook would be the perfect buyer for Twitter. Yahoo would be interesting but wouldn’t make the most of it. It’d be a perfect way for Bing to get front-and-center in the social media world, but Microsoft might not want to spend the money. It would never happen, but Reddit would be a fascinating buyer.

Another day, another WordPress plugin bug. This time it’s for WP-Super-Cache. “The persistent cross-site scripting bug allows attackers to insert malicious code into WordPress-published pages that use the extension, according to a blog post published Tuesday by security firm Sucuri. Anyone who relies on the plug in should immediately upgrade to version 1.4.4, which has fixes for that bug and several others.”

An interesting article from MIT Technology Review on making artificial intelligence less dangerous. “Many people working on AI remain skeptical of or even hostile to Bostrom’s ideas. But since his book on the subject, Superintelligence, appeared last summer, some prominent technologists and scientists—including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates—have echoed some of his concerns. Google is even assembling an ethics committee to oversee its artificial intelligence work.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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