NEW RESOURCES

Less “New” and more “Back from the Dead,” it’s Politwoops! WOOT! “You’ll notice a few changes to the tool that we’re excited to share. For starters, we’ll be showing you every deleted tweet — not just the ones we think are important — made by elected officials and candidates for office. Right now that includes Senate, House and presidential candidates, as well as governors and the D.C. mayor. In the future we hope to expand that to executive branch officials and state legislators. We’re also planning to implement a filtering system to more easily weed out simple errors and typos.” This is just the announcement for the US version. Hopefully the other ones are on the way.

Oh my goodness. The Internet Archive has created a Windows 3.1 emulator that runs in JavaScript, AND made over 1500 software programs available. “Now, Scott and his crew have done it again with the Windows 3.X Showcase—made up of a whopping 1,523 downloads (and counting), all running in a surprisingly robust, browser-based JavaScript emulation of Windows 3.1. You’ll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree, but the vast majority of the collection sticks to a particularly wild world of Windows shareware history, one in which burgeoning developers seemed to throw everything imaginable against 3.1’s GUI wall and see what stuck.” The “Scott” in this quote is Jason Scott. Could I have any more of a nerdcrush on this guy?

California residents have a new tool for tracking independent expenditures in political campaigns. “Power Search now enables users to quickly and easily browse all independent expenditures affecting state-level candidates and ballot measures from 2001 through the present. The tool uses the California Secretary of State’s CAL-ACCESS raw bulk data and examines the independent expenditures reported in Form 465 (Supplemental Independent Expenditure Report) and Form 496 (24-hour Independent Expenditure Report). The data is refreshed daily.

TechCrunch takes a look at Gjirafa, a new search engine for Albania. “[Mergim] Cahani and his team are literally going out and capturing a plethora of information that exists solely offline and moving it online. To begin with, that’s meant digitising fragmented and disparate bus timetables, but Gjirafa’s longer term and more ambitious plan is to digitise the whole country, including creating a Yelp-style database of local businesses and venues — the majority of which currently have zero presence online.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Twitter has launched a new advertising tool called First View. “First View helps marketers achieve significant audience reach with exclusive ownership of Twitter’s most valuable advertising real estate for a 24-hour period. When users first visit the Twitter app or log in to twitter.com, the top ad slot in the timelines will be a Promoted Video from that brand. Now, marketers can tell a powerful visual story across the Twitter audience.” Powerfully expensive, I’ll bet…

In an effort to protect against click fraud, Google is filtering traffic from 3 botnets. “Vast networks of malware-infected computers, known as botnets, generate vast sums of revenue for perpetrators while depleting advertiser budgets on fake traffic by mimicking ad traffic patterns that look nearly identical to usual user behavior.”

USEFUL STUFF

Ants Magazine has a roundup of 40+ free fonts. I like Ants’ roundups because the fonts are not all decorative things that you’d maybe use once. These are every day fonts. And they pick good ones. Sunday, PH, and oh wow, Gagalin.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

UNICEF has announced an innovation fund to invest in open source technologies for kids. “To qualify for funding, projects must be open source and have a working prototype. They can involve developing a new technology, or expanding or improving an already existing one. UNICEF’s Innovation Fund, which has raised $9 million so far, offers innovators in developing countries a pooled funding mechanism to help them take their tested projects to the next stage.”

Yahoo has announced its first round of layoffs.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Over on TechCrunch, Josh Constine rants (his word) about why Twitter is nearly unfixable. He has several good points but doesn’t mention developers. The comments (at this writing) bring up developers and bring up other points. Good afternoon, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!