TWEAKS AND UPDATES

From Tubefilter: Vimeo Launches Video Review Tools, Complete With Time-Stamped Edits. “For those of us who use Google Docs to review, critique, and comment on our colleagues’ drafts, the Video Review interface looks rather familiar. Creators can share their work with others before presenting it to the public, and their editors — whether amateur or professional — can insert suggestions that pop up at the exact time-stamp when they are relevant. As with Google Docs, the original video owner can interact with these comments by replying to them or dismissing them.”

Google is launching “Instant Tethering”. “The mobile hotspot on your phone can be super-useful, but it’s also a little tedious to get it set up when you need it. There’s a new feature rolling out as part of Google Play Services 10.2 that makes it much easier. It’s essentially automatic with a feature called Instant Tethering. Not everyone will have it right away, though.”

Social Times: Page Admins Can Have Facebook Remind Them to Update Their Pages. “Reader Chris Ruberg, digital marketing specialist at OneCommand, shared the screenshot below with SocialTimes, in which page admins are given the option of setting custom reminders to update their pages.” I haven’t seen this yet, but I can see where it might be useful.

USEFUL STUFF

I know some of you out there are big R fans. Here’s a free guide to using R for text mining. “Jilia Silge and David Robinson are both dab hands at using R to analyze text, from tracking the happiness (or otherwise) of Jane Austen characters, to identifying whether Trump’s tweets came from him or a staffer. If you too would like to be able to make statistical sense of masses of (possibly messy) text data, check out their book Tidy Tidy Text Mining with R, available free online and soon to be published by O’Reilly.”

Lifehacker: Top 10 Free Alternatives to Expensive Software. “Unless you have a company buying licenses for you, tools like Photoshop, Pro Tools, Maya, or even Windows can be a serious bite out of your wallet. Here are some more affordable options to those normally pricey apps that’ll help you stop fretting and get more done.”

How-To Geek: How to Take a Screenshot of an Entire Webpage. “A simple screenshot is great for capturing what’s immediately visible on your monitor, but what if you need to capture an entire webpage? Here are three simple ways you can capture a long web page as one continuous image and, in the process, preserve it exactly as it appears to the viewer.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed: Viral WhatsApp Hoaxes Are India’s Own Fake News Crisis. “The United States is currently experiencing a fake news crisis — bogus news articles disguised to look like real ones to mislead people, influence public opinion, and/or to simply use their massive reach to reap advertising profits. These operations are sophisticated, data-driven, and highly targeted. But in countries like India where internet penetration and literacy still lag far behind the US, misinformation tends to have a more grassroots quality. Twitter is a fertile ground for all kinds of rumormongering, but with just over 30 million users in the country, its impact is limited. The primary vector for the spread of misinformation in India is WhatApp.”

From the LA Times (Paresh Dave is rapidly becoming a must-read for me): Spectacles might get the buzz, but for investors Snapchat is all about the advertising. “The Los Angeles company has promised more gadgets will follow. But even with a significant increase, hardware sales in the near term probably would bring in 100 times less revenue than selling ads displayed on Snapchat. It’s that potentially massive, multibillion-dollar ad business that has investors most excited about Snap Inc., which is expected to open its stock to public trading in the coming weeks in one of the tech industry’s highest-anticipated initial public offerings in years. So why is Snap insisting it’s actually a camera company?”

FastStuff: Google Focuses on Project Loon for Global Internet. “As news that Google decided to ditch project Titan that was an effort to make internet access globally available to everyone spread these days, people started wondering again whether the vision of a truly world-wide web is currently tangible or not. The reality is that we should fear not as Google is actually focusing their efforts on that part to a far more feasible and effective solution that uses high altitude balloons instead of drones.”

Twitter apparently did not have a happy Inauguration Day. “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized Saturday for accidentally making it so that Twitter users followed @POTUS and other administrative accounts even when they tried not to. It was a complex ordeal during which Twitter told Mashable on Friday, following reports of users saying that they were automatically following @POTUS under Trump even when they were not before or had unfollowed prior to Inauguration (as Twitter outlined they could do), that there was no glitch.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Wow! A municipal government in Spain has endorsed Tor. “These best-of-breed tools for anonymity and accountability have often been the subject of government complaints and threatened crackdowns, but in Barcelon, the city government has endorsed the Complaint Box, advising Barcelonans who know about corruption to safely report it by using the platform. It’s the first time a municipal government has endorsed Tor.”

One more reason to lock your screen when you leave your desk. From the Daily Dot: 20 percent of Facebook users snoop on friends’ accounts. “If you leave your Facebook account open on your phone or desktop, somebody’s going to snoop on it. At least, that’s what a recent University of British Columbia study found after polling 1,308 adult Facebook users in the U.S. The researchers discovered that 24 percent—nearly one in four users—admitted to snooping on friends’, partner’s, or family member’s Facebook accounts using the victim’s own computer or phone. Twenty-one percent of those surveyed were knowing victims of this kind of ‘insider attack’ on Facebook. ” Good morning, Internet…

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