NEW RESOURCES

From the British Library, with another big thanks to Esther S: Our First 100 Polonsky Pre-1200 Manuscripts Are Now Online. “The first 100 manuscripts are up! The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700–1200 is celebrating its first digitisation milestone. 100 manuscripts from the British Library have now been added to our Digitised Manuscripts site for you to explore!”

The Next Web: 20,000 unfairly deleted UC Berkeley lectures are now available for free. “Earlier this week, the University of California at Berkeley purged some 20,000 lectures from various academic fields from its YouTube channel following a less-than-sensible ruling from the US Department of Justice. But it seems not all content might be lost. In an effort to preserve the material, digital archive firm LBRY announced it has taken the initiative to copy all 20,000 videos and make them permanently available for free on its website.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: The Grassroots Campaign to Make Reddit Less Toxic. “As a company, Reddit has shown itself to be either ambivalent or complicit in abuse on the site, but users are fed up. Two new but rapidly-growing subreddits—r/esist and r/fuckthealtright—want to do something about it, and they’ve already claimed credit for getting hate speech community r/altright banned for harassment. Yesterday, they set their sights on one of the Reddit’s worst offenders.”

CNET: Goodbye, YouTube annotations: Google ends support May 2. “Google’s making a change to YouTube that’s already been underway: YouTube annotations are being discontinued. The reason is all mobile.” Also, annotations are annoying.

USEFUL STUFF

Skyword: How to (Actually) Use Twitter for Freelance Writing Jobs. “You probably had that one friend in college. Someone you didn’t like all that much, but kept around because they always seemed to know about the best parties. For those looking for freelance writing jobs, social media can feel akin to that friend—in other words, a necessary evil. It is no longer enough to be able to dissect complicated concepts into digestible and relatable copy or find witty and original ways to subversively spotlight a client’s product without ever mentioning its given name—you also have to be able to help share that content with the world.” This article is also a decent discussion of online community — focused on Twitter — in general.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TechCrunch: Instagram is the latest nexus of the Marines photo sharing scandal. “Following the revelation that a private Facebook group with 30,000 members targeted female Marines in a non-consensual photo sharing ring, other toxic online communities are popping up — and proving that the Marines United scandal is by no means an isolated incident.”

The Guardian: French advertising giant pulls out of Google and YouTube. “A French advertising group that has clients including O2, EDF and Royal Mail has become the first of the major global marketing companies to pull all its ad spend from Google and YouTube. Havas, the world’s sixth largest marketing services group, spends about £175m on digital advertising on behalf of clients in the UK annually.”

Marketing Land: Google Home gets ‘Beauty & The Beast’ promo, but Google says it’s not an ad. “Ask Google Home what your day is like today, and it will remind you that Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is opening. Google says this isn’t an ad. But it’s definitely an out-of-the-ordinary cooperation with a Google Home ‘partner.'” Google has apparently pulled this not-an-ad-at-all (eyeroll) after a lot of pushback.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Arkansas Online: Virus found in database of job seekers, state says. “Investigators are trying to determine whether personal information — including Social Security numbers — for an estimated 19,000 Arkansas job seekers was stolen after a virus was detected in a statewide database, a government spokesman said.”

Techdirt: Facebook Sued In Israel For Blocking All Links To Site Critical Of Facebook & Suggesting Site Was ‘Unsafe’. “Mizbala is an Israeli marketing/creative agency that runs a news site as well, commenting on issues related to internet marketing and advertising. The site has been quite critical of Facebook, including a few recent posts where it mocked Facebook for its aggressive/arbitrary blocking of users and content…”

The Register: Official: America auto-scanned visitors’ social media profiles. Also: It didn’t work properly. “The US Department of Homeland Security used software to scan social media accounts of people visiting America, but it didn’t work properly. That’s the conclusion of a study by the department’s inspector general. In a heavily redacted report [PDF] that surfaced this week, the watchdog revealed that in December 2015, US Citizenship and Immigration Services ran a pilot program to check social media streams both manually and automatically for any signs of wrongdoing.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

From The Journal of Learning Spaces: Using Facebook to Promote a Virtual Learning Community: A Case Study. “The use of social media by members of college campuses, including students, staff, and administrators, is on the rise and a growing body of research is examining such use. In this study, two graduate level courses that incorporated Facebook’s closed group feature into the course logistics are explored. It was found that using Facebook could promote a virtual student learning community. The students involved used the groups for sharing ideas and support, asking questions, and participating in discussions. This article provides a framework for using Facebook to develop a virtual student learning community.” Hit the PDF link for the entire article. Good morning, Internet…

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