NEW RESOURCES

80 years of Southern Wesleyan University yearbooks are now available online. “SWU’s yearbook collection goes back to 1930. Early on, the yearbook was titled ‘WE-ME-CO,’ short for ‘Wesleyan Methodist College.’ From the early 1930s until 2006, the yearbook was known as ‘Centralian.’ From 2007-2012 (its final year) it was published as ‘Cornerstone.'”

The Arkansas Parole Board has created an online database of parole decisions. “The Online Decision Search Tool initially contains parole decisions going back to Sept. 1 of last year. It will be updated weekly, the board said.”

A company called Mapillary is trying to take on Google Street View with crowdsourcing. “Mapillary announced Seed funding about a year ago (Sequoia led that round), and in the last year it has been building up a community of users globally, some 18,000 photo enthusiasts who have uploaded photos to contribute to a database that now covers over 1 million miles and 50 million images. These are mapped on to maps from Mapbox, and users can search images and get exact map locations, or reverse search map points to find photos.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Baylor University has created a complete digital archive of its student newspaper. “If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably wondering where we’ve been the past month or so. Well, it’s been a long time coming, but we’ve been laboring over a major project and have returned today to announce a major addition to the Baylor Lariat digital collection. For the first time ever, every issue from 1900 to the most recent completed academic semester (Fall 2015) is available in one place: The Lariat Digital Archive!”

YouTube Creators now have a chance to win an Emmy. “…the Television Academy has expanded the Emmys to not only include more internet-friendly short form categories (such as outstanding actor/actress and outstanding variety series), but widen its definitions to make room for more internet-only video shows. While you probably won’t see your favorite “let’s play” star take home a statuette, this gives YouTubers with artistic ambitions (such as PewDiePie and Lilly Singh) a much better shot at winning a major, peer-voted award.” I’m rooting for the Slo Mo Guys and Jorg Sprave.

USEFUL STUFF

Wanna take better pix? IceCream Digest has a roundup of free online photography courses and classes for beginners.

How-To Geek: How to safely share passwords with family members. Or roommates, or fellow members of that committee you’re on….

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Congratulations to genealogy site CYNDI’S LIST! it’s celebrating its 20th birthday. “What started out as a side-page in a personal genealogy web site has become one of the top genealogy resources online. The original site started on one web page with 1,025 links. By the end of that first year the site was sorted onto individual pages with more than 9,600 links in more than 50 categories. Just after its one-year anniversary the site had grown to 17,300 links in more than 60 categories on 195+ separate web pages. The site has continued to grow exponentially with the popularity of genealogy and the Internet. Today there are more than 330,000 links in 207 categories that point to an endless supply of related genealogy links online.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Facebook is about to start paying a lot more in UK taxes. “After heavy criticism that it was avoiding tax, the BBC can reveal that profits from the majority of Facebook’s advertising revenue initiated in Britain will now be taxed in the UK.” This is going to put a lot more pressure on Google.

Mozilla has banned a popular Firefox add-on after it was discovered messing about with browser security settings. “Mozilla developers have taken steps to ban the popular YouTube Unblocker add-on after it was caught altering browser security settings and even installing a second add-on without the user’s consent.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Oh, yuck: endangered species are being sold on Facebook. “Traffic, a global wildlife trade monitoring network, released a report today that exposes rampant illegal wildlife trade on the site. For five months, the group’s researchers monitored 14 Groups on Facebook in Malaysia, everyday, for a half hour a day. What did they find? Over 300 wild, live animals being sold as pets on the website. Nearly half the animals’ species were protected or illegal to sell under Malay law.”

Research: can Twitter be used to recruit cancer patients into clinical trials? “In the pilot study, [Dr. Mina] Sedrak and his co-authors analyzed a randomly chosen sample of 1,516 Tweets out of a total of 15,346 unique tweets that contained ‘lung cancer’ from January 5 – 21, 2015, and observed where they lead the public. Although the majority of tweets analyzed (56 percent) focused on giving and receiving psychological support or dialogues about prevention, the study found that nearly 18 percent (221) of tweets were about clinical trials, 42 percent of which were tweeted by individuals (including self-identified patients, health professionals, advocates, and non-health users).” Good morning, Internet…

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