NEW RESOURCES

There’s an effort underway to create an emoji translation project. “The Emoji Translation Project is a proposed emoji translation engine and phrasebook that would translate common English phrases into universally understood emoji strings that is being developed by Fred Benenson and Chris Mulligan.”

USEFUL STUFF

A free and useful article from The Wall Street Journal: the best ways to organize a lifetime of photos. Read the comments; there are several useful suggestions/thoughts in with the trolling.

Goofy Chrome extension will save pages for you based on whether or not you’re smiling. I need one that saves when I swear.

Mozilla has launched Mozilla Science Study Groups. “Taken all together, the scientific community has a huge amount of programming knowledge; but it’s split up across individuals that rarely have the opportunity to share that knowledge. Crippling self doubt often arises not from genuine inadequacy, but a loss of perspective that comes from working in isolation where it becomes possible to imagine that we are the worst of all our peers. And as we saw at the NCEAS event, the so-called discoverability problem evaporates very quickly with even a small group of people pooling their experience. The skills & knowledge we need are there in pieces – we have to find a way to assemble them in a way that elevates us all. The Mozilla Science Lab thinks we can do this via a loose federation of Study Groups.”

Louisiana State University has launched a new digital achive containing information on people of color who lived in Louisiana during the colonial period through the Civil War. “Among the earliest documents in the digital archive are the papers that granted freedom to Jean-Baptiste Meullion’s mother, written in Spanish and signed the year the Revolutionary War began.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Dropbox Notes, a collaborative note-taking service, has moved into what looks like closed beta. “Early testers of the Notes service previously described it as offering a clean note-taking experience, with a user interface that used a lot of white in its design, similar to Evernote on the web, and that continues to be the case as Dropbox Notes heads into beta.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Search Engine Land takes a look at the Twitter / Google search deal and Twitter’s “search signals”.

Measuring the popularity of different emoji in different countries. I confess to laughing.

Wow. Apparently Facebook Messenger accounts for 10% of global mobile VOIP. “Considering Facebook only fully rolled out free mobile VOIP calling to Messenger last April, it’s impressive that it’s already becoming a legitimate competitor to apps like Skype. And just yesterday it began rolling out free VOIP calls to WhatsApp on iOS after bringing the feature to Android last month.”

Google has spent more money on lobbying so far this year than any other corporation (but not more than any other entity.) “During the first quarter of 2015, Google spent $5.4 million lobbying the federal government, an increase of 43 percent from the same period last year, according to the data analyzed by the government transparency group MapLight.” Good evening, Internet…

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