NEW RESOURCES

Digg has launched Digg Dialog. “Here’s how Digg Dialog works: When we discover and feature an exceptional article (or video), we will invite the journalist or an expert to come talk with Digg’s community. If they accept, we will schedule a Dialog and post the time and guest on our homepage. A few hours before our guest arrives, the Dialog page will go online, and you will be able to start posting questions.” Sounds like a AMA’s cousin.

Crisis Text Line is releasing its human interactions as a data set (an anonymous data set, of course). “Currently, our Level 1 data can be found on Crisis Trends, which provides aggregate, real-time crisis data to the public. You can find data on the top 20 issues experienced by people who contact Crisis Text Line and segment it by hour of day, day of week, month over month, or by state. We also show frequency word clouds of the top 50 words used by texters for each issue. For example, for family issues, ‘mom’ is mentioned much more frequently than ‘dad.'”

Somebody made a new search tool for Reddit. “You can do a few things with the site. You can perform a search and restrict it to a subreddit as well. The month of July is a particularly interesting month for Reddit, because that’s when the entire Victoria / Reddit Blackout occurred. If you do a search with no keyword and type in a subreddit, you can see that subreddit’s entire comment volume history for the month.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

The Sunlight Foundation has updated its IFTTT channel. There are three new triggers:
“When Congress is scheduled to vote on a bill, When a legislator in Congress has a birthday, [and] When there is a new legislator representing you”. This blog post announcing the update also has some absolutely delicious IFTTT recipes.

More IFTTT: IFTTT now has an Amazon Cloud Drive channel.

USEFUL STUFF

Wired: How to make a clean break with the clingiest social networks. “Social media outlets make money off of you and your information, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they don’t want to let you go. Because of this, many have made it complicated to delete your account. But if you are set on getting rid of them, here’s what you’ll have to do.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Interesting: Yahoo employees have apparently been banned from playing fantasy sports on any site. “As for Yahoo’s new rule, employees company wide, it seems, will no longer be allowed to play fantasy sports on any other fantasy site out there. Previously, the limitation only applied to fantasy sports leagues on Yahoo.” I’ve gotta wonder: is this legal? I mean, I’m sure you could create an employment contract that stated it, but can you retroactively forbid your employees from taking part in legal activities? I honestly don’t know. Not HR certified, not a lawyer…

Looks like Twitter is having layoffs this week. “Those close to the company have argued for years that Twitter has become too bloated. It reported roughly 4,100 employees last quarter, more than double the roughly 2,000 employees it had in Q2 2013 just before the IPO. Twitter’s user base has grown less than 50 percent in that time. Of course, some of the growth has come via acquisitions — Twitter has made plenty over the past two years. But still, the feeling from those close to the company is that Twitter’s engineering team is much larger than it needs to be.”

The guy who owned the Google.com domain name for about a minute has been given a bug-hunting bounty by Google. He decided to donate the bounty to charity and Google doubled it. So cheers all around.

VentureBeat did a hands-on with Google Street View and Google Cardboard and apparently we will never see them again. “I took a mini vacation in Google Street View. I was able to look 360 degrees around in a bunch of places, while using the OnePlus Cardboard virtual reality (VR) headset, based on the Google Cardboard VR system. Google announced full Cardboard support for the Google Street View app on iOS and Android earlier today, and now I want to do nothing other than look at more Street View scenes with Cardboard.” Good morning, Internet…

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