afternoonbuzz

RootsTech, Delicious, Regular Expressions, More: Monday Afternoon Buzz, February 1, 2016

NEW RESOURCES

FamilySearch has announced the free broadcasts for this year’s RootsTech. Two of my favorites, Amy Crow and Anne Mitchell, are on the list.

TWEAKS & UPDATES

You’re more used to hearing about online services adding feeds, but Delicious is actually discontinuing its premium service. “While we appreciate the passionate users who paid to use our service, the bottom line is that there have not been enough to support the resources required to maintain separate functionality.”

USEFUL STUFF

I love this! Crosswords to help you learn regular expressions. “If you’ve been using regular expressions for a long time, they aren’t very hard. But learning them for the first time can be tedious. Unless you try your hand at regular expression crosswords. The clues are regular expressions and the rows and columns all have to match the corresponding regular expressions.”

Lifehacker has a read-it-later smackdown between Pocket and Instapaper. I didn’t read anything here that will tear me away from Pocket, but now I want to go try the IFTTT recipes.

Because sometimes they’re just annoying: How to uninstall extensions in several different browsers.

SEO Book has an extensive infographic about Google SEO. It’s not really detailed enough for minutiae, but if you’re an end-user and you just want to get an idea of all the factors/decisions/cosmic rays influencing Google rankings, this is a nicely-organized graphic to explore.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Very interesting: an Elon student is teaching piano on Instagram – 15 seconds at a time. “Individual lesson may be short, but in a few short weeks, active followers can quickly build up a knowledge base. Instagram followers aren’t the only ones that have taken notice of his unique teaching style. [Addison] Horner recently presented at the Music Teachers National Association Collegiate Piano Pedagogy Symposium.”

Happy 9th blogiversary to Larry Ferlazzo! If you have any interest in teaching, English, or ESL, check out his blog. It’s good stuff.

More birthdays! Distributed Proofreaders is 15 years old and has digitized 30,000 books. “Founded 1 October 2000, Distributed Proofreaders is a crowdsourced website whose volunteers convert books to electronic formats and make them available for free distribution via Project Gutenberg.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

From ZDNet: Your social data is doomed, and don’t count on Facebook to save you. “Our data at public service providers like Facebook and Google has a single purpose — to be monetized in exchange for being able to be share that data with others. That is the contract which is well-understood. The data has significance to the provider only if it can be monetized in some way. So status updates, tagging, photographs, videos and the like will only be stored long term if they have value to the provider.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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Categories: afternoonbuzz

2 replies »

  1. Not just a comment on this article! Thank you for the round up of stuff so regularly and so interestingly! I just dabble in digital humanities but it is intriguing to get a glimpse of what else is going on. Keep going!

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