TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Do you dig Flickr? How about VR Flickr? “At the XOXO Festival taking place in Portland, Oregon this weekend, Flickr is showing off an early preview of a virtual reality experience that it hopes to integrate with its photo service. The demo at the festival was with an Oculus DK 2 hooked up to a PC and the idea is that you’ll be able to use the headset specifically with 360-degree panoramic photos.”

USEFUL STUFF

From Digital Trends: An overview of how to use Snapchat. I still don’t get Snapchat.

From HubSpot: The 11 Best Photo and Video Editing Apps for Mobile. I think Camera+ is free now.

I am enough of a nerd that I have a favorite Google Sheets function. Actually I have two: importXML and VLOOKUP. If you’ve never explored the joys of VLOOKUP, Enjoy this article from Exceljet.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Interesting overview from TechCrunch on ad blocking and why it’s such a huge issue. I worked in an ad agency many thousands of years ago, and it got me interested in advertising. In fact, the first newsletter I did online was not ResearchBuzz. It was called SKYWRITING and it was about advertising. I did it for about a year, I think. This was around 1995. Also I co-authored a book on Internet advertising called POOR RICHARD’S INTERNET MARKETING AND PROMOTIONS, around 1998. My point is that I’ve been watching advertising on the Internet since around the time it started, and while I can see both sides of the story, advertisers did a LOT to bring this on themselves. If you can’t even run your browser well because so many ad networks are trying to load on a page — or if you’re trying to read the news early in the morning and auto-play videos run WITH AUDIO and make you jump and spill your coffee — your first thought when these things happen is, “Oh, I need to keep looking at advertising because I need to support this publisher.” No, it’s “I have to turn this crap off right now. How do I do it?”

This should be interesting: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will join a Facebook Q&A. “Among the topics to be discussed at Facebook’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters on September 27 is how communities can work together to address social and economic challenges. Zuckerberg encouraged his followers to submit questions on Facebook to be posed to the prime minister during the Q&A.”

Wamda: A day in the life of a Facebook programmer. “Lebanese developer Ziad Traboulsi (right) is a lead software engineer at Facebook’s Dublin office. He’s been working there for the past five years and is currently involved with Internet.org, a Facebook-led global partnership dedicated to making affordable internet access available to the two-thirds of the world not yet connected.”

More medical Glass: Google Glass for autistic kids. “[Ned] Sahin’s company is building software and hardware add-ons for Google Glass that they hope will help children with autism learn some of these social skills and help provide caregivers with feedback. It’s still early for the app, clinical trials on the product begin this fall at Harvard Medical School and the program is currently in beta testing.”

Looks like Google is making more self-driving cars. “When Google originally showcased the newer low-speed ‘cute-mobile’ self-driving car, it mentioned a goal of having about 100 of them on the road for testing within a couple years. Now, as the company is bringing its low-speed electric prototypes to Austin a year later, Sarah Hunter, head of policy for Google [X], has revealed that the company is expanding production of the cars (via The Guardian). ”

From Mashable: Google searches for a new identity. “The bright — and, sure, childish — new branding offers the first clear glimpse of how Google intends to better position itself in a global market that favors smaller screens and just as importantly how it makes big strategy decisions as a subsidiary of the newly created parent company Alphabet, which was announced only weeks before the logo change.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

From Fast Company: the trouble with digitizing history. All those years of copyright extension and other legal foolery has come back to bite us on the nose. “For all of Sound and Vision’s efforts, though, only 2.3% of its digitized archive is publicly available online. Schools and researchers are allowed to access 15% of the archive on Sound and Vision’s website. For the rest, Sound and Vision’s administrators have to ask the copyright holders’ permission to release their clips outside of the building. Frequently, it involves making calls to several people, and sometimes they say no.”

The first monthly Android security updates have rolled out. “The Nexus system image page added Android 5.1.1 build “LMY48M” for the Nexus 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10, along with build “LMY48N” for the Android TV-based Nexus Player. LMY48M hit Google’s public AOSP repository yesterday (September 9).” Good morning, Internet…

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