NEW RESOURCES

In development: a digital archive of Black British people, 1990s-2000s. “Social media has become a haven for #melanin, instagramming your trips ‘back home’, and tweeting videos of that carefree aunty who dared to whine harder than the rest at your mum’s 50th. Aspiring to create a platform that will last beyond Instagram likes and Twitter legend are Black In The Day co-founders Tania Nwachukwu and Jojo Sonubi. Their vision is to collate an online archive of black British life from the 1990s to the early 2000s, filled with crowd-sourced photographs.”

NASA has launched a new research portal. “Citizens now have easy access to NASA-funded research data, including peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings…. NASA created this new Research Results portal in response to the Feb. 22, 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum, ‘Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research,’ encouraging data sharing and communication of research results from federal agencies.”

Legal research hints… in a coloring book? Why not. “CALI has published a coloring book authored by three librarians, Elizabeth Gotauco, Nicole Dyszlewski, and Raquel M. Ortiz, that gives an introductory primer on how to do legal research. Along with essential information, it also provides line drawings for the reader to color in.” The PDF version is free.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

All of Google’s cloud database services have left beta. “Google is making a number of announcements around its Cloud Platform today. Most of these focus on its various cloud database services, but the company is also making a major update to its low-cost Nearline cloud storage service for cold data, making its disk volumes faster, and allowing its users to bring their own encryption keys to Cloud Storage. The overall message Google is clearly trying to send here is that its cloud computing services are ready for production use.”

Facebook is tweaking its Messenger bots. “On Monday, Facebook announced that it’s restricting how long Messenger bots have to respond to someone before they’re muzzled but is relaxing its rule forbidding promotional messages. Some Messenger bots will be able to sidestep the time limit with the introduction of subscription-based messaging.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Watchdog.org just added another part to its Google series. (I thought it was a three-part series. Apparently not.) “Some former Google employees-turned Obama administration officials may have violated the president’s own ethics policy in meeting with their former colleagues. Four White House staffers who previously worked for Google met with their former co-workers within a year of transitioning from the company to the Obama administration.”

Vanity Fair: YouTube Stars Are Now Being Used for North Korean Propaganda. “Louis Cole is a 33-year-old vlogger from the U.K. with about 1.8 million subscribers on his FunForLouis YouTube channel. He’s a highly competent travel vlogger, part of a subset of daily YouTubers that also includes Ben Brown: British lads, many of them fans and acolytes of American vlogger Casey Neistat, obsessed with cameras and time-lapses and documenting their coffee habits. Cole’s videos are well-edited and engaging, and the sheer constancy of his travel—he’s forever on the go, it seems—ensures that his frequent videos are rarely dull or un-special, as so much on YouTube is. Cole, like his daily vlogger brethren, is relentlessly positive, projecting a chill-dude, laid-back, good-vibes vibe—sometimes to a pathological degree. Which brings me to his travels in North Korea, a series of videos that he’s currently uploading. ”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

On September 7, the FTC will webcast an event about ransomware. “FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez will provide opening remarks to start the event, which will include panel discussions examining the state of ransomware, how consumers and businesses can protect themselves and what to do if they fall prey to a ransomware scam.” The event is free and preregistration is not necessary. Good afternoon, Internet…

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