NEW RESOURCES

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has digitized two student publications. Ka Palapala, a kind of student annual, covers the 1920s to the 1960s. The student newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawaiʻi, has been digitized for 1922-1949 and 2002-2010.

The Digital Library of Georgia has a new historic newspaper archive. “The West Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive provides online access to six newspaper titles published in five west Georgia cities (Butler, Carrollton, Dallas, Douglasville, LaGrange) from 1843 to 1942. Consisting of over 37,000 newspaper pages, the archive provides historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date.”

Reddit has launched a new news site… which won’t have comments? “In the works for the past year, the site looks and feels much like any other news site out there. It will have stories, infographics, illustrations, videos, and podcasts. It will include articles on news, sports, animals, and lifestyle issues. It will have its own website, upvoted.com, and a dedicated editorial team creating original stories. But, unlike other news sites, it will be a part of Reddit. And, very much unlike Reddit, it won’t allow comments on the site at all. (Nor, despite its name, will it have any kind of upvoting system.)”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Bing has added several tools for developers to its search results, including a color picker, an ASCII table, and, for some weird reason, a QR code generator. You may be a little confused about how to find these tools in Bing but you just invoke them in the search box. Searching for Color Picker puts that tool at the top of the results page, while my search for QR Code Generator showed a couple of ads first, then the code-generating tool.

Google Street View… now with Google Cardboard support? Wow, except for my regular slight squick about holding a phone up to my eyes for an extended period. “Street View users will now be able to hit a Google Cardboard icon to toggle-over to a mode supporting the viewer (maybe something like the new View-Master VR) when looking at publicly shared Photo Spheres. With full head tracking, you’ll be able to look around and check out some scenery from all over the world – right from the comfort of your desk.”

Periscope now has an “On Air” button for broadcasts. “It’s a useful little tweak that anyone can use. All you have to do is enter your Periscope username (typically your Twitter handle without the ‘@‘) into Periscope’s button generator, and it creates an code so you can embed a button into a webpage.”

Facebook is now offering profile frames of college football teams in case you’re into that sort of thing. Problem is they’re only featuring eight teams. Seriously? Apparently other NCAA teams are eligible, but they have to partner up with Facebook or something.

Twitter has launched Moments. “Moments, as the new product is called, surfaces the day’s most talked-about stories in a new section of the app. It’s a magazine-like view of Twitter that works even if you’ve never followed a single person. It represents Twitter’s best — and maybe last — hope of attracting a large new base of casual users who want to enjoy the service without having to figure out its unique quirks and lingo.” It was all stories I vaguely knew about thanks to Facebook’s right-column “trending” thing. It sure would be nice if Facebook made it easier to surface the links shared by the people I actually follow. Don’t expect I’ll use this at all, but then again I’m not the target audience.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Instagram has ranked its most popular accounts and Taylor Swift wins. I’m not very good at Instagram but my favorite account is Skellie (@OMGLiterallyDead). (Warning: Skellie swears a lot. And drinks. Man, can that skeleton drink.)

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Russia is giving Google until November 18th to adjust its Android deployments. From (a translated version of) the announcement page: “These include mandatory preset with the Google Play a number of other applications of the company, their placement in the priority areas on the screen, the mandatory installation of the search engine Google ‘default’ as well as a ban on the preset applications of other companies.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Looks like social media isn’t totally about the negativity. “… new computational social science study says the positive emotions associated with social media generally outweigh the negative ones. The study, published yesterday (Sept. 30) in Peer J Computer Science journal, examined the content and proliferation of more than 19 million English-language tweets from September 2014. It found that negative content spread faster than positive content—but positive content was shared more and ultimately reached a larger audience.”

Interesting: visualizing cities via Flickr photo sets. “A year ago, together with Yahoo Labs, we released a dataset of 100 million Creative Commons Flickr images as a response to requests from many universities and research centers seeking real-world data….The Flickr Cities visualization looks at the 49 million geo-tagged photos in the open dataset and gives you a compelling and fun way to navigate and explore several cities.” Good morning, Internet…

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