NEW RESOURCES

The Sheldon Museum of Art (in Lincoln, Nebraska) is digitizing its entire collection. “The Sheldon Museum of Art is creating an online digital archive of the 12,866 items in its collection. The digital archive will feature images and detailed information of all of the items in the museum’s collection. The project is expected to cost around $130,000, about $10 for every piece of art.” That seems quite inexpensive!

LinkedIn has launched a new app for students. “Using insights from LinkedIn’s database of over 400 million professionals, the brand new app helps you discover jobs that are a best fit for graduates with your major, companies that tend to hire from your school and the careers paths of recent alumni with similar degrees.”

New-to-me: Someone created a database of North Korean films. It looks like an embedded Google Sheet, and as you might imagine it’s not enormous. This database is part of a larger blog on North Korean films that goes back to 2011.

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Historians and archaeologists, this’ll make you happy: the “PeriodO” Web tool has gotten a grant for further development. “Scholarship on the ancient world, in particular, uses conceptual rather than quantitative language to refer to time. Instead of referring to dates, it refers to periods—but different scholars can use the same period terms to mean widely different things. PeriodO is an online gazetteer of historical, archaeological and art-historical period definitions that utilizes linked data to solve the problem of multiple categorizations of historical periods by the cross-referencing the definitions of such periods by authoritative sources, rather than by relying solely on globally-accepted period concepts.”

I’m trying to wrap my head around this without any luck: YouTube will allow you to broadcast live in 360-degree video. “If viewed on a laptop, viewers can use a mouse to adjust their perspective. But if watched on a smartphone or VR headset, the experience becomes more immersive, as changes in viewpoint correspond to the movements of the device being used.”

Podcasts are now available on Google Play. Still waiting for a decent podcast search engine, however.

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker has a GMail vs Outlook.com smackdown. And I still miss Eudora.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books keeps the Google Calendar ideas flowing with part VII on better organizing with Google Calendars. I must say the idea of creating a dinner calendar sounds brilliant.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

I am not a fan of celebrity gossip sites. But it bothers me when Facebook can shut down a huge site’s Facebook fan page and feel perfectly fine with giving a limited explanation of “IP violations.”. “Facebook confirmed that it took the page down ‘for IP violations’ but didn’t say what those violations were.” With Facebook trying to create its own walled garden, being less-than-transparent about how it enforces its rules and why it takes the actions it does is not going to serve it well.

Google may be focusing on AR for the long haul, but they’re looking for some VR staff in the short term. Check out this Google open contract: User Experience Researcher, Virtual Reality. And experience with VR is not required but a “plus,” so if you’re a computer grad with UX experience, get in there! I saw that this posting asks responses to be sent to Matthew Kam. I searched his e-mail address to see if he had any other ads up, and while I didn’t see any immediately, I did see that with his Web site listing, Google includes a warning that the site might be hacked. Oh dear.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear the Google Books case appeal. “The Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene in a case examining whether Alphabet Inc.’s Google engaged in copyright infringement when it scanned millions of books and made them searchable online, a final blow to authors who sued the company.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

From The Register: What’s wrong with the Daily Mail buying Yahoo? “DMG – parent both of the Daily Mail print newspaper and the massively successful online site Mail Online – has no magic answer to ‘How to monetise content at scale,’ and neither does Yahoo! The result is therefore like the classic tying of two bricks together to see if they will now help each other float.”

Doesn’t look like Twitter drives a lot of traffic to news sites. “Twitter generates 1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations, according to a new report from the social analytics company Parse.ly that examined data from 200 of its client websites over two weeks in January.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

MUSEUMS! Looking for something to do on social media? Try a little statuary face swapping. I bet this would work for paintings, too. Good morning, Internet…

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