NEW RESOURCES

A new Cuban genealogy collection is now available from Florida International University. “An extensive set of family trees, civil records and sacramental documents is now available on the Internet. It references thousands of Hispanic surnames and gives everyone from the Abadias to the Zúñigas the opportunity to search for their ancestors. The material comes from the Enrique Hurtado de Mendoza Collection of Cuban Genealogy, a treasure trove that also features hard copies of more than 3,500 17th and 18th century books, long out-of-print publications and periodicals that few, if any, other U.S. libraries hold. The online offerings can be accessed by going to FIU’s Digital Library of the Caribbean and searching by last name.”

A new database is collecting shark sightings, but “sightings” is defined pretty generously: “Started by shark biologists Ryan M. Kempster and Channing A. Egeberg, SharkBase gives citizen conservationists a place to report shark sightings, ‘whether you’ve seen a shark or not,’ according to SharkBase.org. ‘Even if you have never seen a shark in the wild, you can still contribute to SharkBase by submitting sightings that you see in the news or on the Internet,’ the site says.” Also: all your shark base are belong to us.

I’m sure many of you know about the New York Public Library collection of menus. Now available online is a collection of over 1000 menus from the Memphis, Tennesee area.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Metadata company Gracenote is getting into a new vertical. “Music and video metadata company Gracenote is launching a new product for a new vertical, getting into sports data for the first time. To power the new sports product the company has acquired a couple of companies — Infostrada and SportsDirect — for a combined $54 million.”

The state of Utah has launched a new Web site (PRESS RELEASE).

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Is Google going to get into hands-free mobile payments later this year?

The “Children’s Word of the Year” is hashtag. “Hashtag has been declared ‘children’s word of the year’ by the Oxford University Press. OUP analysed more than 120,421 short stories by children aged between five and 13 years old, submitted to the BBC’s 500 Words competition.”

Speaking of dictionaries, Merriam-Webster has added several words. Including emoji!

This should be really interesting: A UN report has asserted encryption is a human right. “Encryption that makes a communication unintelligible to anyone but the intended recipient creates ‘a zone of privacy to protect opinion and belief,’ says the report from David Kaye, who as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression is essentially the U.N.’s free speech watchdog.”

There was a drag queen protest at Facebook on Monday against Facebook’s “real name” policy.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

From MIT Sloan Management Review: Diversity in your Twitter network leads to better ideas. “A multitude of empirical studies confirm what [Steve] Jobs intuitively knew.2 The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative. A diverse network provides exposure to people from different fields who behave and think differently. Good ideas emerge when the new information received is combined with what a person already knows. But in today’s digitally connected world, many relationships are formed and maintained online through public social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Increasingly, employees are using such platforms for work-related purposes.3”

Harvard Business School: The benefits of oversharing on social media networks. “In What Hiding Reveals, Assistant Professor Leslie John, in the Negotiations, Organizations & Markets (NOM) unit, found that keeping unsavory information to ourselves may not always be in our best interest. In fact, sometimes people think better of others who reveal ugly truths over those who keep mum.” Good morning, Internet…

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