NEW RESOURCES

Hey! It’s like IMDB, but for podcasts! “Podcat automatically tracks podcasts made available on iTunes and breaks down who appeared on each episode. You can click through to a host’s page and see everywhere they’ve shown up – which is actually sometimes quite surprising.”

I’m cynical about this kind of thing, but in case you’re not, here’s a press release about a new search engine for finding influencers. “The new search engine allows users to search by any number of demographic filters across hundreds of thousands influencers and tens of millions of social media posts. Results can then be further filtered by the relevance of the post content to what the user is looking for, a level of detail previously unheard of in the influencer marketing space.” Looks like it’s currently in closed beta.

Twitch is launching a food channel, so we get a Julia Child marathon! “The move builds on the success of Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting, a classic TV show that was first shown on Twitch last October. It was hugely popular and sparked a weekly slot on the site, which has now morphed into two showings each Monday. The company will be hoping for a similar reaction to The French Chef, in order to launch its new cooking channel and the other shows that will inevitably follow.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Cricket is getting a lot of love from the search engines this year. The latest up: Bing. “With the onset of Twenty20 cricket season starting with the ICC World T20 in India, Bing has announced a refreshed set of search features such as Bing predictions, polls and quizzes designed to give cricket fans an enhanced search experience.”

USEFUL STUFF

Nervy stuff (in a good way) from Ned Potter: How to use Instagram as a photo editor and not a social network.

From GroovyPost: Guide for Freeing Up Drive Space on Windows 10 PCs.

BetaNews has a writeup on a Windows / Mac app that lets you selectively extract images from PDFs. Big downside: it requires Java. “Scroll through the pages, click on anything interesting (a single page only, no multi-selection allowed) and PdfTrick generates thumbnails for every image on that page. Select one or more of these images, click “GET IMG”, choose your destination folder, and the images are extracted and saved to a subfolder with a name based on the date and time….”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge looks at parody Twitter accounts. “These accounts are generally places where joyful, intermittently ironic tribute is paid to the people or objects that make up popular culture. But dig a little deeper into Twitter’s dustier corners, and you’ll find a huge, interconnected, bafflingly popular collection of fan-made parody accounts — a strange cousin to the Twitter fan club, where celebrities and brands are assimilated, rather than fawned over.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Interesting: data mining consumer product reviews might help with product design. “Ismail Art Yagci and Sanchoy Das of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, at New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, USA, explain how web reviews are a readily available source of product intelligence and suggest that such reviews might contain significant pointers regarding the pros and cons of a design or features that are redundant, unwanted or missing. In light of this, the team introduces a design-feature-opinion-cause relationship (DFOC) method that can extract design intelligence from unstructured web reviews.” Good morning, Internet…

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