NEW RESOURCES

Now available on The Internet Archive: 500 Apple II Programs. “To understand this achievement, it’s best to explain what 4am (an anonymous person or persons) has described as their motivations: to track down Apple II programs, especially ones that have never been duplicated or widely distributed, and remove the copy protection that prevents them from being digitized. After this, the now playable floppy disk is uploaded to the Internet Archive along with extensive documentation about what was done to the original program to make it bootable. Finally, the Internet Archive’s play-in-a-browser emulator, called JSMESS (a Javascript port of the MAME/MESS emulator) allows users to click on the screenshot and begin experiencing the Apple II programs immediately, without requiring installation of emulators or the original software.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

A new digitized set of Salem College student newspapers are now available. “The Salemite is the Salem College Student Newspaper, continuously published under that name since 1920. Salem College was founded in 1772 in Winston-Salem and is one of the oldest women’s colleges in the United States. The newly digitized issues are from 1970 through 1978.”

Ars Technica has a writeup on an add thing called “Google Posts”. “It seems to be a place for Google to directly host content in a post-Google+ world and to embed this content directly into search results. Imagine orphaned Google+ posts with the Google+ branding stripped out, and you’re most of the way there.”

USEFUL STUFF

First Draft will be offering a series of free online workshops on social media newsgathering and verification. “Members of the First Draft coalition from Storyful, Reported.ly and Bellingcat will discuss their work in reporting terror attacks, investigating weapons shipments, and geolocating the Syrian conflict.”

I have seen several articles on infographic design, but fewer on general A-Z guidelines for start-to-finish infographic creation. Here’s a good one. “The dearth of infographic projects coming my way is not surprising; for all their efficacy at communicating large amounts of data in an easy-to-digest package, infographics can be tricky, inscrutable things to get up and running, and for what may initially seem like a small return on investment. But the research is out there to support the idea that infographics are uniquely qualified to reach and educate people in a way that all the guest articles and blog posts in the world just can’t.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Two possibly interesting Kickstarter projects you might want to know about. The first one is trying to crowdfund a collection of free illustrations for speech therapists to use. “Every day, in all parts of Italy (maybe in your country too), new speech therapists find themselves having to create in a hurry, often with material found at the last minute, customized activities for their children. In this way, it takes its time building something that others have already built over and over again … well, we reinvents the wheel. The purpose of this project is to create a shared database of free images for the activities of speech therapists.” The English in this Kickstarter is a little rough, but his English is 1000x better than my Italian, so.

The second one is a project to digitize the sound files of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Maharishi. “Some 40 thousand hours of video and sound files of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi were recorded during his 60 years of teaching Transcendental Meditation to the globe. Our goal is to have a library of pre-1973 sound files professionally transcribed and made available through published books in the form of anthologies, as well as populate an online database of the transcriptions for the further study of Maharishi’s body of work.” The goal for this Kickstarter is $75,000.

I don’t mention a lot of SEO on ResearchBuzz, but this is so amusing I felt I had to share: apparently the 10th position in the first 10 Google results gets more results than position 8 or 9. “Paul Haahr, one of the senior folks at Google who work on search rankings, said at SMX West yesterday that position 10 gets way more clicks than positions 8 or 9. He explained that no one wants to click to the next page, so they are more likely to click on the 10th and last search result.”

Livestreaming pioneer Meerkat is going to pivot. Good story from Re/Code. “Two weeks ago, Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin sent an email to his company’s 48 investors laying bare an observation that he’d made peace with months earlier: Meerkat, the livestreaming app that played the role of darling one year ago at the annual SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, was failing.” Ben Rubin is handling this incredibly well.

Why you shouldn’t blindly trust Wikipedia: a recent edit said Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer (which would be a bit tough since those took place before he was even born). The article has since had that removed, and the article’s on a lock until March 15.

Wow, those Yahoo C-Suite folks make some serious buckaroonies. “In a regulatory filing today, Yahoo attached the employment letter for its current CRO, Lisa Utzschneider, which showed a salary, stock and bonus package that added up to an eye-popping $18 million. That would be $600,000 for her base salary — although Utzschneider was not yet a C-level exec to start, but head of sales for the Americas — with the possibility of a 90 percent bonus, or $540,000; a $1 million signing bonus; and stock that was valued at $16 million, based partially on performance and largely on a typical four-year vesting schedule.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Try to wrap your head around Google’s new “Right to be Forgotten” plan. Search Engine Land has the skinny. “This change closes that backdoor — which wasn’t likely used much anyway — on a country-by-country basis. It’s a much better outcome than if Google had been ordered to censor for all people worldwide, as that potentially would have caused it to censor globally for political reasons, such as with China.”

A German court has ruled that Facebook may block pseudonyms. “Facebook may prevent its users from using fake names, a German court said on Thursday, overturning a previous order from the Hamburg data protection authority. The ruling is a coup for the social network firm which has long argued its real-name policy ensures people know who they are sharing and connecting with and protects them from the abuse of the wide-open Internet.” Good morning, Internet…

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