NEW RESOURCES

New-to-Me: Paramount has created a YouTube channel with 100 of its movies viewable for free (US-only, apparently – sorry). You won’t find the latest-and-greatest here, but there are plenty of fun choices, including the classic The Devil and Miss Jones staring the wonderful Charles Coburn and the also-wonderful Jean Arthur. (And then Spring Byington almost steals the whole thing.) Please note that there is another movie called THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES which is completely different from THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES and please don’t forget which is which when you’re doing a Google search or your eyeballs may fall out.

The American Aviation Historical Society has joined Flickr Commons. “During their more than fifty years of documenting significant events in the industry, coverage has included Air Force, Naval, and Marine aircraft, and their deployment in WWI, WWII, and the Korean and Vietnamese wars. They also document the emergence of civil aviation from the Wright Brothers, to the evolution of commercial aviation companies and the aircraft they operated.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

LinkedIn is apparently making all LinkedIn Groups private starting October 14th. “The biggest change — the one that LinkedIn believes will make a qualitative difference — is that all Groups are being made private; only Group members will be able to see the contents of conversations, and only members will be allowed to contribute. LinkedIn also won’t allow search engines to crawl the discussions, another key, it believes, to providing a trusted private space for people to communicate.”

Facebook wants to help you find a handyman. (Handyperson?) “The social networking site is joining with Seattle startup Pro.com, which will help a Facebook Messenger user find a qualified contractor, get an instant quote and schedule an appointment within minutes on home projects from mounting a big-screen television to painting a room. Pro.com, which operates in more than 5,500 U.S. cities, also unveiled on Wednesday a similar text-messaging service separate from Facebook.”

WordPress has released a plugin to support Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). “The plugin is still in early stages, but you can see it in action on WordPress.com or even this very post.”

USEFUL STUFF

Interesting quick read from Jessica Serrao: Google Analytics and Digitized Cultural Heritage. “Recently, I began examining the use of Duke University Archives’ digital collections to see what I could find. I quickly found that I was lost. Google Analytics is so overwhelmingly abundant with data, what I’d venture to call a statistical minefield (or ninja warrior obstacle course?), that I found myself in a fog of confusion. Don’t get me wrong, these data sets can be extremely useful if you know what you’re doing. It just took me a while to get my bearings and slowly crawl out of the fog.”

The DPLA has released a self-guided curriculum for digitization. “Through the Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), DPLA has been working with existing DPLA Service Hubs to provide digital skills training for public librarians and connect them sustainably with state and regional resources for digitizing, describing, and exhibiting their cultural heritage content…. Now at the end of the project, we’ve made this curriculum available in a self-guided version intended for digitization beginners from a variety of cultural heritage institutions. Each module includes a video presentation, slides with notes in Powerpoint, and slides in PDF. Please feel free to share, reuse, and adapt these materials.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Forbes: Google’s inability to force software updates threatens Android. “The public exposure of the StageFright vulnerabilities has seen Google push manufacturers and networks to sign up to its monthly security updates and push these through regularly, but uptake has not been universal – HTC is the latest manufacturer that is having to say thanks but no thanks because it believes a monthly update is unrealistic when put alongside the demands of carrier testing programs.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Get your computer ready – Adobe is releasing a pile of patches next week – and several of them are for Acrobat. “The advanced notification of the fixes does not elaborate on the vulnerabilities given that doing so will help attackers brew exploits ahead of patch time, but it does award a ‘critical’ severity rating of two that indicates each bug is likely to be exploited when those details drop.”

The Wall Street Journal was apparently hacked. “It seems the attack was mostly targeted at accessing contact information like names, addresses, email addresses and other similar data. However, Lewis also noted that credit card information for about 3,500 customers ‘could have been accessed’ — though again, he says there’s no direct evidence yet that the data was actually stolen.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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