Hey! It’s Museum Week on Twitter! #MuseumWeek

NEW RESOURCES

A local Irish newspaper that focused on positive news is now available in a digital archive. “Started by local resident, Seamus Kelly, in June of 1998, Ballymun Concrete News was a dedicated newspaper for the people of Ballymun that was available in the area free of charge.” The newspaper ran until 2006.

TWEAKS & UPDATES

A service called Katch archives and keeps available Periscope videos, and it now has a search option for its archived videos. I searched for “beach” and found over seven thousand videos. Unfortunately it looks like you have to have Flash to actually watch them.

Speaking of videos, Instagram has upped its video limit to 60 seconds. “The photo sharing platform announced it’s going to let everyone capture 60-second videos. The new minute limit goes into effect today, and everyone should have it in the next few months.”

Tumblr has its replies back — months after losing them. “The return of the Reply button will make plenty of diehard Tumblr users happy. The new feature also has more options than it did in the past. The old reply system only let the audience of a post reply to the author. Now, Replies can be conversational.”

USEFUL STUFF

We can argue about the “useful,” but let’s not: upload an image and have it redrawn in straight lines. “The app is actually quite elegant in its execution. Darker areas of an image are where you’ll find more straight lines stacked atop each other to create contrast. Obviously, the algorithm is a little more complex than just drawing more layers in one part of an image versus another.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Ruh-roh. Looks like RootsWeb has lost some data. “As you may know, the RootsWeb site was recently unavailable as the result of a hardware failure in our datacenter. Our development and web operations teams worked diligently and carefully to address the issues, and as a result, the site is now available again. Regretfully, despite their best efforts, our teams were not able to retrieve all of the data associated with the site.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Apparently a fair number of people would sell their work passwords. “Some worrying news for those concerned about corporate security: One in five employees would be happy to sell their work passwords, some for just the price of a dinner. That’s according to a new survey run by SailPoint, a company that sells software for managing user access on corporate systems.”

Facebook has patched a pretty big Instagram hole. “According to a blog post published on Friday, [Arne] Swinnen came across two security weaknesses while accessing an old test account on the photo-sharing platform. The researcher has disclosed Instagram vulnerabilities in years past, and once he returned to his test account, Swinnen was redirected to a page which required account verification due to inactivity.” Good afternoon, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!