afternoonbuzz

Short Tuesday Buzz, August 16th, 2015

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google News is getting new languages. “Google News already supports 28 languages spanning 45 countries. Over the next few days we will add seven new language editions. Romanian is the first followed by Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Thai.”

USEFUL STUFF

From Social Media Examiner: 14 Social Media Marketing Tools Recommended by the Pros. Nice collection here.

A Prezi I think you’ll like: 23 Things: Libraries for Research Data. Described as “An overview of practical, free, online resources and tools that you can begin using today to incorporate research data into your practice of librarianship”. The transcript is kind of messy but there’s a nicely-formatted handout PDF at
https://rd-alliance.org/system/files/documents/23Things_Libraries_For_Data_Management.pdf.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Facebook is working on treating public and private events differently. “Public events will now have larger header images, and will present more information about the location and event, such as an artist’s profile or photos of the venue. Meanwhile, wall posts will be less prominent given they will almost certainly be strangers.” It’s also considering having more options than the simple “Yes/no/maybe” of going or not going. Which I think would be great; often I’m interested in the event but can’t attend because everything happens on the west coast; it’d be nice to have a “Keep me posted” button that hips me to tagged multimedia or followup posts.

WIRED takes a look at YouTube and what it might do for livestreaming. Another good search/data aggregation idea, folks – it’s a royal PAIN to get a calendar of hangouts and other planned live events taking place on YouTube. You can filter for things that are live right now, but a) that doesn’t let you plan, and b) search results like that give minimal amounts of information about the live event. Every time I hear someone say that all search problems online have been resolved, I want to throw things. “YouTube built some of the infrastructure for live video almost by accident, in the course of creating the YouTube we know now. It has a terrific, usable player that is embeddable basically anywhere and accessible all over the world. It supports almost any technical setup you can think of. It has subscriptions, channels and a notification system that can easily shift from ‘Casey posted a new video’ to ‘Casey is live!’ But Bronstein and his team also discovered livestreaming comes with its quirks.”

University endowments are getting rid of Twitter stock. “Yale University, which has a $23.9bn endowment fund, sold all of its 34,345 shares in Twitter – worth just under $1m at Monday’s stock price – over the last quarter. Harvard University, the world’s wealthiest university with a $36.4bn fund, sold 29,856 Twitter shares between April and June. Stanford, which has an endowment fund worth $21.4bn, sold 18,000 shares.”

The latest iteration of Android is named Marshmallow. Do you wanna build a snowman?

The Vatican Museums have launched a new app to crowdfund restoration projects. “The Vatican Museums have released a crowdfunding app called Patrum, with the intention of raising money for a series of upcoming restoration projects that include the restitching of an 18th-century French tapestry and the conservation of 13th- and 14th-century Chinese calligraphy scrolls.” Good evening, Internet…

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