NEW RESOURCES

I do not use Reddit very much, but I’ve set up some Google Alerts that watch it specifically for content and wow, have I found some good stuff. The latest is from a user who scraped RadioLab and made an torrent/archive. And they cleaned it up: “I went through and renamed them all from the ambiguous, inconsistent naming convention that the CDN used to “RadioLab – {episode title}.mp3″ (yes, that was rather tedious, to say the least) and set all the IDv3 tags within them to use the proper Author, Title, and Album values as well. However, the album for all files is just ‘Podcast’ as I didn’t want to go through all the Series/Seasons just yet and manually enter that data in. Maybe one day I’ll do that.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

OCLC is launching a linked data pilot. “OCLC is working with seven leading libraries in a pilot program designed to learn more about how linked data will influence library workflows in the future. The Person Entity Lookup pilot will help library professionals reduce redundant data by linking related sets of person identifiers and authorities. Pilot participants will be able to surface WorldCat Person entities, including 109 million brief descriptions of authors, directors, musicians and others that have been mined from WorldCat, the world’s largest resource of library metadata.”

Apparently Facebook is adding a temporary profile picture feature. “Those with the feature will see the option to set an expiration date when they select a new profile picture. When the expiration date hits, their profile pic reverts back to their old one without publishing a News Feed story announcing the change. Their temporary one will still be visible in their album of profile pics.” That’s nice. Now how about a feature for pages to schedule temporary cover photos, so they can promote events, holidays, etc. without having to make sure to go back and change everything manually at the right time?

Twitter is apparently testing highlights in its notifications. Which explains those weird “Soandso and Soandso are tweeting about thusandsuch” notifications I’ve been getting on my phone….

USEFUL STUFF

From Supercompressor: 14 Google Maps Features You Never Knew Existed. Actually if you’re a ResearchBuzz reader / Google power user you probably *did* know about most of them, but it’s a good roundup.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Angela Merkel is calling out Facebook on racist posts. “Germany is expecting a record-breaking influx of refugees this year. Politicians and celebrities have voiced concern about a rise of xenophobic comments in German on Facebook and other social media platforms because of the refugee crisis.”

Huh: What your favorite Instagram filters reveal about your personality. That I still don’t get Instagram?

From The New Yorker: What Ever Happened to Google Books? “On one hand, Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes, putting it in a league with the world’s larger libraries (the library of Congress has around thirty-seven million books). That is a serious accomplishment. But while the corpus is impressive, most of it remains inaccessible. Searches of out-of-print books often yield mere snippets of the text—there is no way to gain access to the whole book.”

Kathy Savitt has left Yahoo. “Under Ms. Savitt’s media projects leadership, Yahoo started more than a dozen digital magazines in the United States, struck a partnership with Live Nation to webcast a live concert every day, revived the ‘Community’ television series as a Yahoo show and commissioned two original streaming series.” The interesting thing about Yahoo’s media efforts is that it’s always seemed to focus on big names and famous people/events — and not on different technology or ways of accessing content. I mean, can you imagine Yahoo’s strategy including Periscope, for example? Or it embracing the “people want to watch other people play video games” oddness of Twitch? (Not that there’s anything wrong with watching other people play video games. I’m just having a hard time imagining anyone anticipating it as a content attraction.)

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Apparently those Ashley Madison passwords weren’t as well-protected as originally thought. “Now that a hobbyist team has uncovered programming errors that make more than 15 million of the Ashley Madison account passwords orders of magnitude faster to crack, it will be only a matter of time before a large percentage of them are available to hackers everywhere.”

Oh, yuck. Apparently Web site hacks now include Google Webmaster tools. “Hackers who compromise websites are also increasingly verifying themselves as the owners of those properties in Google’s Search Console. Under certain circumstances this could allow them to remain undetected longer than they otherwise would be, researchers warn.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

People of a higher social status have fewer international friends? “A new study conducted in collaboration with Facebook using anonymised data from the social networking site shows a correlation between people’s social and financial status, and the levels of internationalism in their friendship networks – with those from higher social classes around the world having fewer friends outside of their own country.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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