NEW RESOURCES

Today I learned there were such things as Scottish lifting stones. And I also learned that there are some people who go around the world picking up these stones and putting them down. (You can read more about lifting stones here.) Finally, I learned that a very famous pair of these lifting stones is getting an online database. “Weighing just shy of 770lbs collectively, they have long been regarded by strongmen – since the days of Donald Dinnie – as the most famous of the Scottish lifting stones. And now, the son of the first man to recreate the legendary Birse athlete’s feat of strength on the banks of the River Dee has created an online database dedicated to the history of the ‘Dinnie Steens’.”

A new Web site will provide information on the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. “The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) is set to launch a new interactive multimedia website later this month hosting more than 1 million publicly accessible documents related to the Khmer Rouge regime. Pheng Pong-Rasy of DC-Cam’s genocide education project, said the new website will launch next week and is intended to be a free resource that Cambodians will be able to access from their smartphones to learn about their collective past.”

Someone is creating a YouTube archive of the old TV show Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. It looks like over 150 episodes are up. Comedians guesting on the show include Greg Proops, Maria Bamford, Judy Gold, Scott Thompson, and Jim Norton.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Interesting. The University of New England will start streaming some of its athletic events on Facebook Live. “The first Facebook Live event will be tomorrow’s basketball doubleheader (Jan. 3) versus Western New England University. The women’s game starts at 5:30 p.m. followed by the men’s game at 7:30 p.m.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Need a story illustrating the importance of good naming standards for your photo archives? Here ya go. “You may have noticed that Newshub’s redesigned website launched in December. As part of this, we took the necessary step of moving our entire photo archive across to a new database. Unfortunately, more than 5000 of these images shared file names with another one (for instance, we had around 20 photos named ‘police.jpg’).”

PBS NewsHour has an extensive story on Brewster Kahle and The Internet Archive. “What’s online doesn’t necessarily last forever. Content on the Internet is revised and deleted all the time. Hyperlinks ‘rot,’ and with them goes history, lost in space. With that in mind, Brewster Kahle set out to develop the Internet Archive, a digital library with the mission of preserving all the information on the World Wide Web, for all who wish to explore. Jeffrey Brown reports.”

The New Yorker: The Bot Politic. “In February, I took a job designing the personality of a chatbot called Kai. I ghostwrite the lines it says, and I have thought, while testing it, that talking to myself has rarely been so unpredictable. Kai, which was conceived by my employer, Kasisto, to help customers with online banking, works over text message, Slack, and especially Facebook Messenger, where more than thirty-four thousand other chatbots have joined it since April, when Facebook opened the platform to developers.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Hollis Thomases: If You Really Like My Tweet, Please Don’t “Like” It. “The problem with creating a button that is supposed to mimic a Facebook Like but doesn’t is that in addition to the existing ambiguity, the Twitter heart has become the defacto way people — many of whom are new to Twitter or who never understood the platform well to begin with — respond to a tweet. Just like a Facebook Like button, all you have to do is press the heart and move on, right? Well, not really.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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