NEW RESOURCES

Instagram has launched an official @Music community. “Instagram said the @music account will be home to content provided by artists such as Tricot and Questlove, but also from folks close to the industry such as ‘music photographers, album illustrators, instrument makers and, of course, fans.'”

NPR is now making pretty much all its audio embeddable. “From NPR stories to shows to songs, today we’re making more than 800,000 pieces of our audio available for you to share around the Web. We’re throwing open the doors to embedding, putting our audio on your site…. We’ve offered NPR audio embedding before — but only sporadically and never at this scale. Just about every piece of audio on NPR.org will now provide the option.”

Some of Canada’s national parks are now available via Google Maps.

USEFUL STUFF

This is only useful because it’s Fun Friday: You can now play Internet Archive’s classic DOS games within Twitter. ” Wired recently discovered that if you paste the URL for a game’s site into a tweet then view the tweet on the web, you can play the game right then and there within the tweet.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

So, that new Google Password Alert extension for Chrome? It’s already been bypassed… twice.

Are you finding blurry images in Google Image Search?

The state of Colorado has upgrade its online transparency Web site (PRESS RELEASE). “The TOP website offers open access to Colorado’s financial records and is the state’s official public finance resource. This easy-to-use tool provides meaningful information about how the state government utilizes public funds and where those funds come from. The new site allows users to search financial records by organization, vendor, funds, category or any combination of the four.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Civil War Day by Day blog has wrapped up after 1450 posts. What an amazing project. Terrific work. “The challenge to the archivists was to sift through the many choices and find the real gems. Hollingsworth, other librarians and graduate student interns spent hours in the stacks of Wilson Library, pulling metal boxes from the shelves and reading the yellowing papers inside. The archivist estimated that each blog entry took from two to 10 hours of work to create: searching, scanning, transcribing, tagging, sharing on social media. (In a bow to Twitter followers, the headline for each entry is a pithy, often Tweetable, quote from the document that follows.) The result was a rich catalog of missives from top generals, diary entries from women on the home front, eloquent love letters, scribbled notes from the barely literate, painful reports from the front written by soldiers on both sides and messages from slaves to their masters.”

Twitter has lost more than $1 billion since it went public. I really don’t know what’s going to happen to Twitter. I have ranted before about how it needs to start giving love to 3rd party developers instead of yanking API access left right and forward. I can’t tell you how many services I really, really loved I can’t use any more because Twitter restricted API access. I still miss ListiMonkey, for crying out loud. If I were Twitter I would start looking more at monetizing my data/API and creating premium services (or working with 3rd party developers to create premium services). If they’re going to try to make it on just advertising revenue they’re going to get creamed by Facebook and Google.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Apparently how much you post about drinking on Facebook has a correlation to how muhc you actually drink. Hm. Would have thought that went without saying. Of course if this is correct, then — (quickly reviews all Facebook posts) — I must binge drink unsweet iced tea. And hey, I do! SCIENCE! Good evening, Internet…

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