NEW RESOURCES

Do you like Twitch? There’s something like that for coding. “The way Livecoding works is pretty simple. Developers stream live video of themselves coding, and users watching can ask questions or give feedback. Since launching a beta in February, Livecoding has seen 40,000 people sign up across 162 countries. Users have streamed in a variety of spoken languages, including Portuguese, Russian, and German, as well as coding languages, including C#, Python, and PHP.”

BusinessWire now has language-based Twitter feeds. “The new Twitter handles feature tweets based on news releases distributed in the following languages: Chinese (CN), Chinese (HK), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.”

i-D Magazine, which as I understand it is a British magazine of fashion and youth culture, has created a digital archive of all its issue covers. Considering that the magazine goes all the way back to 1980, this is a lot of covers. Is that Sade on the cover of #14?

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

All right, Americans: IFTTT now has a 4th of July channel.

The Digital Library of Georgia, which has been a busy little bee lately, has expanded the Savannah Historic Newspapers collection. “The Savannah Historic Newspapers Archive provides online access to seventeen newspaper titles published in Savannah from 1809 to 1880. Consisting of over 103,000 newspaper pages, the archive provides historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date. Additionally, the site is compatible with all current browsers without the use of plug-ins or software downloads.”

GMail has added literally hundreds of new themes and also emoji. This is apparently going to be rolling out but I checked and it’s on my GMail account now (and also on my Google Apps account.) But it’s annoying to have several tabs of emoji and no way to search them – at least no way I can find. Even Facebook lets you search stickers.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The Supreme Court has refused to hear Oracle vs. Google.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed speculates about Twitter going an algorithmic route. If it does I will be very, very unhappy. Nuzzel will become much less useful. “In a worst-case scenario, an algorithmic feed could turn Twitter into an inferior version of Facebook, which might, in turn, alienate its core users. But Twitter is a company motivated by profit. And if that worst-case scenario juices revenue, it could prove to be one its investors accept, even as core users decry it.” Great, let’s shit Twitter up all we want to. As long as the investors are happy, right?

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Interesting stuff from Nature: exploring ways to automatically pull fossil data from research papers. “For a field whose raison d’être is to chronicle the deep past, palaeontology is remarkably forward-looking when it comes to organizing its data. Victorian natural history museums meticulously organized their collections with handwritten cards that survive to this day. And over the past 15 years, researchers have collectively entered records of more than a million fossils into an online database, allowing them to track broad trends in the history of life. Now, palaeontologists are exploring the use of machine algorithms to pull fossil data from their research papers automatically.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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