Please note: in the wake of recent terror attacks, Google is making Google Voice, Google Hangouts, and Hangouts Dialer calls to Belgium or Turkey free. “Google also said it is updating the Google Now cards to provide information on the current transport options within Brussels. This will be useful to those in Brussels as the attacks have crippled the transport network, resulting in a number of transport closures throughout the city. Google’s Now cards will also come with a direct link to the Government Crisis Centre, if needed.”

NEW RESOURCES

Now available: an online archive of manuscripts from northern Thailand. “Working with the National Library of Laos, Penn professor Justin McDaniel, chair of the department of religious studies, has launched the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts at http://lannamanuscripts.net as a resource for the study of traditional literature from this region. At present, the digital library contains images of over 4,200 manuscripts that can be searched and viewed online or freely downloaded, and to which more manuscripts will be added.” A much more extensive article about the archive is available at the Bangkok Post.

TWEAKS & UPDATES

E! is launching a daily show on Facebook Live. “The series, Live From E!, which launched online in 2013 and is hosted by a rotating group of E! News talent including Jason Kennedy, Maria Menounos, and Catt Sadler, will now broadcast via E!’s Facebook page, which currently counts about 9 million ‘likes.’ The 15-20 minute show will run daily at 12:30 p.m….”

USEFUL STUFF

I am linking to this article from Elite Daily for one reason. I wanted it somewhere where I could take it out and point to it. The article’s title is I Asked My Cousin To Teach Me How To Kill It On Instagram Like A Teen. It’s a cute article, but I would have skipped it except for this lovely part: “Above all else, Sophia warns: ‘Try to avoid selfies. They’re really mainstream.'” THANK YOU SOPHIA! Not that there’s anything essentially wrong with taking a picture of yourself. But people die taking selfies. People beat up trees to take selfies. It’s a fad I would be glad to see go.

TechCrunch has a writeup on what sounds like a very cool browser-based podcasting studio. “Cast Studio, the recording portion of the site, captures hi-fi audio from the user and up to three guests. To invite a ‘guest’ to your podcast, you just share a unique URL which will capture their audio and automatically add it to the podcast.”

From MakeUseOf: 3 Free Screen Recorders to Capture Your Windows Desktop. “If you’ve never used a screen recorder before, your life is about to get a whole lot easier. Screen recordings are more than just straight videos of what’s happening on your screen, though those can be useful in multiple ways.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google is going to help Cuba get faster Internet. pssst! Hey Google! There are some rural areas of the United States which could use some help too…

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Seagate and Los Alamos are working together to create an alternative to long-term “cold” storage for data. “Under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, Seagate and Los Alamos are working together on power-managed disk and software solutions for deep data archiving, which represents one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations that must juggle increasingly massive amounts of data using very little additional energy.” Good morning, Internet…

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