NEW RESOURCES

Just launched: A digital archive for Publishers Weekly. “NA Publishing Inc. is partnering with Publishers Weekly to provide their entire magazine archive online to researchers worldwide. Continuously published since 1872, Publishers Weekly has consistently been the authoritative source for U.S. publishing industry news and book reviews, with ongoing coverage of the British book trade throughout its history. A high-resolution, full-color, fully searchable collection, Publishers Weekly Digital Archive will contain every page of the journal ever published, including not only industry leading articles and book reviews, but all advertisements, illustrations, covers, supplementary indexes, and more.” As you might imagine, this is pay-to-access.

A new Web site helps disabled people find accessible Broadway shows in New York City. “This website is a way to help theatregoers with physical disabilities or autism and other sensory sensitivities find Broadway shows with the particular type of accessibility service they require. Theatre Access NYC is an intuitive, user-friendly show finder that allows users to filter and sort through dozens of Broadway shows based on accessibility, and provides details including dates, times and ticket availability for accessible performances.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Google’s got a new version of Chrome and Inquisitr has a rundown.

Seeing Facebook ads for stuff you already have? You might be one of the people who can tell Facebook: I already own this. I am now tempted to mark everything as “already owned” and give myself a very weird demographic profile.

USEFUL STUFF

BetaNews has a writeup on a cool PDF tool for Windows. “ORPALIS PDF OCR Free is a Windows tool which converts image-based PDFs into fully searchable documents. There’s none of the complexity you can get with full OCR tools. Instead, ORPALIS PDF OCR Free provides a simple front end for its core OCR engine — the excellent Tesseract — and manages all the low-level settings itself.” Free edition sounds great, some weirdness with the pro edition. (Read the article.)

Lifehacker has released its 2016 of the OneNote / Evernote smackdown.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

One of the things about living in North Carolina is that the NCAA Tournament is a Big Deal (not to me personally, but.) If you’re following the basketball, check out this article about how teams are using Facebook Live during the tourney. “Eighteen of the 64 teams competing in this year’s men’s college basketball tournament broadcast on Facebook Live this week, joining a widening publisher pool that has already absorbed news outlets, Major League Baseball teams and the Denver Broncos. With interest in the sport at its highest point in the season, these teams are providing fans a glimpse into the lives of players before and after their games.”

Facebook says it isn’t it isn’t really targeting ads based on race. It’s just making assumptions about your race based on your online behavior. “Even though target marketing based on ethnicity is nothing new, it has always been opt-in before. But those going on Facebook are just behaving like members of the general population. Even when a Facebook user says they like #BlackLivesMatter, they don’t feel like asking to opt in to an ethnic identity—it’s just one of many interests that define that person. For marketers at Facebook, that’s the point. They want to monetize every aspect of your identity, whether that’s an ethnic affiliation or a preference for bean thread noodles.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Germany has dropped a hate speech investigation against Facebook. “Prosecutors had been investigating whether Facebook managers may have infringed criminal law after users posted hateful comments against specific groups or people on the social network, an increasing concern amid an influx of refugees into Germany. Failure to remove such posts swiftly may amount to incitement, a criminal offense in Germany, according to the allegations.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Want to get your customer service concern answered? Apparently your best bet is Facebook. “The study says that UK retailers could successfully answer 59 percent of questions asked via Facebook, 55 percent on email and 45 percent on Twitter. Only 10 percent responded on all three platforms.” The US result was similar with a poorer Twitter performance.

TechCrunch: Algorithms force us to compete. And not in a good way. “Previously, if you deemed something important enough to ‘gram or tweet, your followers would see it as long as they opened their apps. You didn’t have to self-consciously worry that your posts weren’t good enough to show up. They were guaranteed an audience. Instead, you merely had to avoid overspamming your friends by filling their unfiltered feeds with too many stories. Now, you might have to choose just your best photo or your wittiest quip to post. Otherwise, it could sink into obscurity, buried below posts that algorithms think people would rather view.”

Cogdog has discovered IFTTT and he likes it! He really likes it!. Also, I miss Yahoo Pipes. Good morning, Internet…

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