TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The State Archives of North Carolina has completed its Troop Returns Collection. “This collection includes lists, returns, records of prisoners, and records of draftees, from 1747 to 1893. The majority of records are from the Revolutionary War North Carolina Continental Line. Records dated after the Revolutionary War primarily deal with the county and state militia troops.”

Twitter’s search mechanism, not great in the first place, is getting worse if you’re interested in recent results. “The platform has moved further away from reverse chronological order in search to relevance order. Now when you look for something using Twitter’s search bar, you’ll be shown relevance-ordered tweets from across Twitter first on the results page.” You can still get date-based search results, but you’ll have to deliberately invoke them.

The Library of Congress has announced new additions to the National Film Registry. “Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today the annual selection of 25 motion pictures that have been inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress because of their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance. This year’s titles range from the Disney animated blockbuster ‘The Lion King’ and the seminal coming-of-age drama ‘The Breakfast Club’ to the 1990 documentary ‘Paris Is Burning,’ chronicling the pageantry of drag balls in New York City, and a collection of home movies showcasing African-American life in Oklahoma during the 1920s.” Nice to see Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Ball of Fire get some love, though Gary Cooper was completely wasted in the movie.

USEFUL STUFF

As usual, great stuff from Amit Agarwal: How to Generate a Report of Bounced Email Addresses in Gmail. “It is important to keep track of your bounced messages and remove all undelivered email addresses from your future mailings as they may adversly affect your sending reputation. Mail Merge keeps track of all your bounced messages in Gmail but if you are using mail merge yet, here’s an open-source Google Script that will prepare a list of all email addresses that have bounced inside a Google Spreadsheet.”

Oh, hey! From MakeUseOf: Live Stream to YouTube With a Raspberry Pi. “By adding a camera module (or USB webcam) to your Raspberry Pi, you essentially get a portable, lightweight and easy-to-hold-or-mount internet-connected camera. So, it makes sense that you might want to stream footage with it. But how do you get started with this? Which Pi model should you use? Is one camera module solution better than another? And how the heck do you get the footage onto YouTube? As with most things Raspberry Pi, it’s remarkably straightforward.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Snapchat Plays Hard to Get With Celebrities and Influencers. “The musician Jay Sean has visited the headquarters of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Instagram has reached out to tutor him on the best time to post photos for maximum impact. But there is one social media service Mr. Sean has not heard from, even though he frequently uses the app to post spontaneous snippets of his life: Snapchat.”

It’s a day ending in y, so Facebook has announced another metrics error. “It’s happened again. For the fourth time since September and the second time this month, Facebook has disclosed a measurement error. Facebook had been undercounting iPhone traffic for some publishers using the social network’s proprietary Instant Articles format, the company announced on Friday in an update to a previously published blog post.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Run a WordPress site? read this Wordfence post about increased brute force attacks. “At Wordfence we constantly monitor the WordPress attack landscape in real-time. Three weeks ago, on November 24th, we started seeing a rise in brute force attacks. As a reminder, a brute force attack is one that tries to guess your username and password to sign into your WordPress website. In today’s post we show you how attacks have increased during the past 3 weeks and share some data about where attacks are originating from.”

Techdirt: Judge: Using Publicly-Available Twitter Profile Info Is Like Stealing Social Security Numbers. “A potential class action lawsuit against Twitter and the creators of a short-lived app that allowed users to ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ celebrities’ Twitter accounts has raised some questions about a federal judge’s grasp on social media reality and the First Amendment.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Quartz: Researchers have found that using social media makes kids less happy in almost every way. “The study found that the more time kids spent chatting on social networks, the less positive they felt about school work and which school they attended, their appearance, and their family. They were also less happy with life overall. Girls were more likely than boys to be negatively affected by social media time, especially in two areas: their attitude to the school they attended, and their feelings about how they looked.” Good afternoon, Internet…