NEW RESOURCES

A new Web site provides information on (mostly) agricultural products produced in Arkansas. “The new site aims to improve accessibility to Arkansas products, giving buyers, grocers, restaurateurs and chefs, and consumers a one-stop database … Close to 800 growers, producers and makers have items listed for purchase. Searchers can query data at no cost to find anything from meat, dairy and fruit varieties to locally made jams and duck calls.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

From the University of Central Florida: VA Selects UCF Historians to Archive Stories of Deceased Veterans. “A University of Central Florida team of scholars has been awarded a $290,000 contract from the National Cemetery Administration, an agency of the Department of Veterans Affairs, to archive the stories of veterans buried in the Florida National Cemetery for a new generation of students. UCF is one of three universities selected to launch the NCA’s Veterans Legacy Program.”

From Moz: The State of Searcher Behavior Revealed Through 23 Remarkable Statistics. “Clickstream data is awesomely powerful, but when it comes to estimating searcher behavior, we need scale. Thankfully, Jumpshot can deliver here, too. Their US panel of Internet users is in the millions (they don’t disclose exact size, but it’s between 2–10) so we can trust these numbers to reliably paint a representative picture. That said, there may still be biases in the data — it could be that certain demographics of Internet users are more or less likely to be in Jumpshot’s panel, their mobile data is limited to Android (no iOS), and we know that some alternative kinds of searches aren’t captured by their methodology**. Still, there’s amazing stuff here, and it’s vastly more than we’ve been able to get any other way, so let’s dive in.” All I can think when I look at this stuff is how much I wreck the curve for some of these stats.

USEFUL STUFF

UC Merced is having a Facebook Live on identifying fake news. It’s on Friday. “With fake news on the rise, check out UCMerced’s upcoming Facebook Live broadcast with Deputy University Librarian, Donald Barclay. Learn how to spot fake news and help prevent the spread of misinformation. We encourage you to ask any questions you have about fake news and evaluating news sources. You can ask questions and engage by commenting on the Facebook Live broadcast. You can also submit questions beforehand by tweeting with the hashtag #AskUCMerced or by emailing social@ucmerced.edu.”

MakeUseOf has a quick overview of how to use Pinterest Lens.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Financial Times: DeepMind and National Grid in AI talks to balance energy supply. “Google’s DeepMind is in discussions with the UK’s National Grid to use artificial intelligence to help balance energy supply and demand in Britain.” What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

NME: SoundCloud may sell for $250 million in desperate bid to raise cash. “SoundCloud is reportedly considering selling for $250 million, despite being valued at three times that amount back in 2014. The streaming platform has been trying to raise $100 million since last summer, according to sources, and has raised around $250 million in investments to date, hence the sale price.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Could Google rankings skew an election? New group aims to find out.. “A researcher who long has argued that rankings on Google and other search engines can skew elections will announce plans on Tuesday to establish a global monitoring system to detect and counter the political effects of such alleged bias.”

Ars Technica: The social media “echo chamber” is real. “By making so much information so accessible, social media has drastically changed the way we consume information and form opinions in the modern era. The danger, however, is that social media creates an ‘echo chamber’ that filters the information people receive so that it largely supports their existing opinions.”

500ish Words: ShatChat: The opposite of an ode to Facebook ‘Messenger Day’. “Unlike most of the internet, I don’t tend to be one of those people who hates new features when they roll out simply because they’re different. There are exceptions, of course. But for the most part, I try to keep an open mind and often like many new features and fully recognize that even if I do not, any fervor over such changes is likely to subside quickly in the ever-shifting quicksands of internet time. Which is to say, I gave ‘Messenger Day’ a few days. I still absolutely hate it.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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