USEFUL STUFF

Over on CogDogBlog, Alan gets into URL hacking to do some really specific searches on Flickr. “I found a pair of 2008 blog posts that showed some extra search parameters you can use in flickr search to filter results by aperture and focal length. It took some playing around, but I ended up doing things like looking for all flower photos taken with a particular camera and setting…”

Interesting and slightly creepy: How law firms use Facebook to track down medical victims. “As chief executive officer of DigitizeIQ, Burd feeds demographic data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into general marketing tools offered by Facebook to identify people most likely to be exposed to a particular drug or medical treatment. For example, Burd was hired for a lawsuit claiming a medical device used in hysterectomies, known as a laparoscopic power morcellator, causes ovarian cancer to spread in patients.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google has launched Google Photos as a separate entity and made it free. “Google Photos gives you a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device. They’re automatically backed up and synced, so you can have peace of mind that your photos are safe, available across all your devices. And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free. We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos, and store compressed versions of the photos and videos in beautiful, print-quality resolution.”

Congress.gov has gotten some more improvements. “So far, 2015 has been a great year for Congress.gov. First, we launched email alerts in February. Then, we added treaty documents and more in March. With today’s update, improvements have been made to search (results, command line and advanced), alerts, browse, and accessibility.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

This TechCrunch article on Dick Costolo and Twitter seems to think Twitter is going to get into curated feeds. As long as we can get the chronological firehose, I’m good.

Periscope is only eight weeks old, but it’s already served some serious video. “Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour took the stage today at the Code conference in Southern California and announced that Periscope users have watched 380 years of content since it launched 8 weeks ago, at 10 years of content watched per day.”

Wow: Netflix accounts for almost 37% of Internet traffic.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Search engines are more trusted for news than traditional media? “Data from PR firm Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer suggests search engines are more trusted than all other forms of media, including traditional/mainstream media and online word of mouth from social media.” Knowing that, and then thinking about how opaque search engines are with their ranking algorithims, is scary. Really scary.

The largest group of active, verified users on Twitter? Journalists. “The report, which is based on a sample of 15,000 verified Twitter accounts, shows that journalists make up nearly a quarter (24.6 percent) of the service’s authenticated users. The next-largest category is sports teams and athletes (17.9 percent) followed by actors and entertainers (13.6 percent).” Good morning, Internet…

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