NEW RESOURCES

A new digital archive shows children’s perspectives of World War I. “What makes the [Liberal Jewish Synagogue] archive so different is that children’s impressions of WWI are a rare find. There are any number of war poets and other literary ventures, but very little survives showing what children thought and cared about a century ago…. Along with teaching Judaism, the religion school gave its pupils an artistic outlet through writing and drawing assignments some about their lives and how they reacted to the war, some reflecting the wartime propaganda, and other pieces giving a strong flavor of the attitudes of the day.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

From WordPress: Import Your Medium Posts to WordPress.com. “With the recent news about Medium’s change in business model we’ve been receiving a number of requests from users on how to import their content to a WordPress.com site. We’re excited today to share our new import tool for moving from Medium to WordPress.com.”

NASA has done another software release. “NASA has released its 2017-2018 software catalog, which offers an extensive portfolio of software products for a wide variety of technical applications, all free of charge to the public, without any royalty or copyright fees. Available in both hard copy and online, this third edition of the publication has contributions from all the agency’s centers on data processing/storage, business systems, operations, propulsion and aeronautics. It includes many of the tools NASA uses to explore space and broaden our understanding of the universe. A number of software packages are being presented for release for the first time. Each catalog entry is accompanied with a plain language description of what it does.”

TheNextWeb: Prisma’s new filter creator lets you copy any art style with AI. “Prisma, that app that turns your photos into paintings using AI, is about to get a ton of new filters. First off, the app is launching an in-app ‘store’ to download new filters. We say that in quotes, because so far, all the filters are free. Prisma says it will be adding new styles every week, and is looking to ramp up to daily additions.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Clean Up Your Facebook News Feed in Just a Few Taps. “On Facebook, the News Feed is king. The algorithms behind it control which posts you see from your friends and your frenemies. Every little action you do on Facebook is tracked and it’s all factored in to determine which posts show up first. Sometimes though, Facebook gets it wrong….Thankfully, Facebook has developed some tools to help you sort your News Feed. Let’s look at how you can see the posts you want to see as soon as you log in without ever having to sort through the cruft.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

From PSFK: Florence Is Letting Visitors Draw Digital Graffiti On Its Monuments. “Since ancient times, humans have used graffiti to leave their mark on the world around them. But when it comes to modern-day tourists leaving messages on historic monuments, city governments have been less than thrilled. In a new initiative aimed at curbing graffiti, the city of Florence, Italy has launched Autography, which allows visitors at the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral to draw on the famous building’s walls digitally.”

Snap’s IPO performance is reminding me uncomfortably of 1998. From MarketWatch: Snap’s market cap surpasses Twitter, Hershey. “Snap, +1.80% the parent of Snapchat, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday and closed at $24.53, up 44% from its issue price, which gave it a public market capitalization of $28.4 billion. The closing market cap makes Snap more valuable than Hershey Co. HSY, -0.25% and Twitter Inc. TWTR, +0.00% among others.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The latest victim of a security breach (and it looks like a real breach and not a leak) is the Coachella music festival. “Coachella, a popular music festival in southern California that features acts like Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Radiohead, revealed this week that its website had been breached, potentially compromising 950,000 accounts containing the personal details of concert-goers who had purchased tickets in years past or registered on the website’s user forums.” There are conflicting reports about whether password information was compromised.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Harvard Business Review: What’s the Value of a Like? . ” It’s possible that getting people to follow a brand on social media makes them buy more. But it’s also possible that those who already have positive feelings toward a brand are more likely to follow it in the first place, and that’s why they spend more than nonfollowers. In 23 experiments conducted over the past four years and involving more than 18,000 people, we used an A/B testing method to explore a crucial counterfactual: what followers would have done had they not followed a brand. Given the millions of dollars in marketing budgets that flow to social media at many companies, the distinction is not trivial. It has enormous implications for marketers’ resource allocations and for how they manage their brands’ social media presence.”

An interesting article/personal experience/editorial/thing from USC: Persuasion and Facebook Live: Scarcity to increase awareness. “‘Are you going to the rally?’ This was the email/text/Facebook message I received from a plethora of sources. This was a rally to support Immigration Rights instead of hosting an Oscar party, by the United Talent Agency in West LA. Seeing that California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Jodie Foster, Michael J. Fox, Reza Aslan, and Keegan-Michael Key would be speaking it seemed like a no-brainer event. The problem was I had business meetings during the time. Fortunately, the event was being hosted on Facebook Live as well. This meant I would still get to see some of the speeches, even if I could not attend the event. In fact, isn’t that one of the purposes of Facebook Live?” The article revolves around the idea of one of Facebook Live’s strengths being its scarcity, which I find interesting because a) it’s counter to so much video on the Web and b) considering how easy it is to rip and share video, it’s not really within the creator’s control… Good afternoon, Internet…

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