NEW RESOURCES

An enormous slang dictionary recently went online. “Holed up in his London flat, Jonathon Green has been toiling among his antique books for years, trying to bring a great work to the masses. That work includes 1,740 terms for sexual intercourse (boozle, bop, bonk, bake the biscuits), 4,589 related to getting drunk (atomized, above par, unable to hit the ground with one’s hat) and 521 that allude to murder (do in, eighty-six, O.J.). And now, after years of struggle, that work has finally gone live on the web.” Basic functions of the dictionary are free.

McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee Knoxville has launched a new online collections search tool. “The online search capability was launched with 1,270 objects from featured collections, including the museum’s map collection, Roman objects, art works on paper, and selected historic photographs. Staff will gradually add additional items from the more than 28,000 objects in the museum’s arts and culture collections. Other collections slated for digitization in the upcoming months include more historic photography, Northwest coast Native American material culture, and Tang Dynasty Chinese ceramics.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wikipedia and the Internet Archive have teamed up. “The Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Foundation, and volunteers from the Wikipedia community have now fixed more than one million broken outbound web links on English Wikipedia. This has been done by the Internet Archive’s monitoring for all new, and edited, outbound links from English Wikipedia for three years and archiving them soon after changes are made to articles. This combined with the other web archiving projects, means that as pages on the Web become inaccessible, links to archived versions in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can take their place. This has now been done for the English Wikipedia and more than one million links are now pointing to preserved copies of missing web content.”

I’m glad that they won’t count, but I’m bothered if they don’t appear. TechCrunch: Twitter finally stops counting usernames against reply character limits in test. “#Beyond140 is coming to fruition with the removal of one of the most annoying laws of Twitter. Some iOS users are now part of a test group that no longer sees a recipients’ usernames appear or count against the 140 character limit when they post replies. This leaves more room for actual discussion.”

Search Engine Roundtable has the scoop on some Google rank change chatter. And the nice thing about SER is that 95% of the time you can read the comments! And they’re useful!

YouTube has launched a new feature called End Screens. “YouTube today officially launched a new feature for video creators called End Screens, which are designed to keep users engaged with the YouTube app and creators’ content. The feature, which places thumbnails at the end of the video, can be used to prompt viewers to watch more of the creator’s videos when they finish watching the first one, or take other actions, like subscribing to the channels, visiting channels from fellow collaborators, and more.”

Uh-oh. Google Fiber has hit a bump. “Google’s mission to blanket the continental United States with affordable high-speed internet just hit the brakes in a big way. On Tuesday, Google announced it would pause the rollout of Fiber, its gigabit online service, in all of the 11 cities for which it announced tentative expansion plans earlier this year.”

USEFUL STUFF

Scholars Cooperative at Wayne State University takes a look at the new oaDOI tool. “oaDOI, a new tool for locating the Open Access version of an article (when available) announced at the end of last week that they were live, and initial reactions to the service have been very positive. It was created by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem, two of the co-founders of Impactstory, an altmetric tracking site, and uses a host of data sources to locate openly-accessible versions of articles based on their DOIs. This looks to be an incredibly powerful tool for researchers and librarians alike for a few different reasons. No tool is perfect, however, so I will outline the main pros and cons of oaDOI below…”

A new tool has been released that turns your 3D models into VR. “The software can be installed as a plugin and is compatible with Revit, Sketchup and .obj files, as to integrate fully into your workflow. The VR experience can then be viewed on all leading VR headsets, including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, GearVR and Cardboard.” It’s free.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The desire of tourists to get an awesome Instagram picture is damaging ancient monuments. “…more pagodas lead to more pictures. And nothing seems to frighten tourism officials quite like a tourist without something to photograph. When Myanmar’s ministry of culture recently banned visitors from climbing on some of the largest structures—thus hindering their access to Bagan’s ubiquitous ‘sunset photo’—the country’s vice minister for tourism was adamant that the ban would ‘seriously impact the tourism sector.’ While he understood the ‘need for the long-term conservation of pagodas … the ban should not have been imposed before an alternative viewing location had been put in place.’
Tourism officials won. The ban was rolled back, and the photos continued.” Hurry up, AR….

Has Larry Page’s “flying car” project been spotted in the wild? “This is one of the first photos of what is believed to be a ‘flying car’ funded by Google co-founder Larry Page. The mysterious aircraft was spotted at the Hollister Airport, where Page’s startup Zee.Aero has a hangar.”

Did you know about Slow TV? “In a world where snappy short-form video is seemingly the way to go when it comes to keeping eyeballs on social media, it turns out people also quite enjoy watching…. not very much at all. Video streaming tools like Facebook Live, Periscope and YouTube are full of fast paced action. But recently there has also been an increasing trend towards ‘slower’ content. It’s boring and gripping at the same time. ” Good morning, Internet…

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