NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: National Poetry Month: New Recordings Uploaded to Recorded Poetry and Literature Archive. “In honor of National Poetry Month, the center has digitized and uploaded 50 new recordings to its online Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Among the additions are recordings by poets laureate Daniel Hoffman, Philip Levine, Rita Dove, Maxine Kumin, Josephine Jacobsen, William Stafford, Anthony Hecht, Robert Pinsky and Gwendolyn Brooks.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Instagram now lets you organize bookmarks into private collections. “Instagram will make its bookmarking feature more useful, the company announced this morning, with the introduction of ‘collections.’ The new feature will allow users to organize the posts they save into private groupings for easier access. The addition may further challenge Pinterest, which also favors image bookmarking and the ability to save items to particular boards.”

The Verge: Google Photos can now stabilize all your shaky phone camera videos. “Google Photos is where all my photos are. Long ago I was a man of SmugMug, and then Flickr, and then at some point spent days and days copying years of images to iCloud Photo Library before eventually disregarding that and switching to Google. What can I say? I’m a simple person who can be easily delighted and swayed by automatic GIF creation and reliable backups. And Google Photos keeps getting better. Here’s the latest example: now the mobile app can automatically stabilize videos in your camera roll with a tap.”

Internet Archive: Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives. “Over time we have observed that the robots.txt files that are geared toward search engine crawlers do not necessarily serve our archival purposes. Internet Archive’s goal is to create complete ‘snapshots’ of web pages, including the duplicate content and the large versions of files. We have also seen an upsurge of the use of robots.txt files to remove entire domains from search engines when they transition from a live web site into a parked domain, which has historically also removed the entire domain from view in the Wayback Machine. In other words, a site goes out of business and then the parked domain is ‘blocked’ from search engines and no one can look at the history of that site in the Wayback Machine anymore. We receive inquiries and complaints on these “disappeared” sites almost daily.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Better Alternatives to Pocket That Bookmark Anything for Later. “Long-time Pocket users are familiar with the problem of an abundance of unread bookmarks. You have to rely on tricks to get through your Pocket queue. And let’s not forget, Pocket started as ‘Read It Later’, its focus being on reading articles. That’s not what bookmarks on the internet are solely about any more. A few new apps seek to solve other bookmarking needs. Videos, for instance, or the ability to add notes to your bookmarks. Or turning your entire browser into a perennial bookmark engine.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Sixth Tone: How Western Fake News Took Over China’s Social Media. “While internet users in the Western world now stand a reduced chance of encountering the Daily Mail’s content, Chinese social media outlets — including microblogging site Weibo and social messaging app WeChat — are frequently abuzz with the tabloid’s stories. In fact, the social media feeds of millions of Chinese netizens are filled not only with translations of the Daily Mail’s stories, but also with a torrent of misinformation from the West’s now-ubiquitous fake news and conspiracy theory websites.”

New York Times: How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media. “Since its 2005 debut with the slogan “Broadcast Yourself,” YouTube has positioned itself as a place where any people with camera phones can make a career of their creativity and thrive free of the grip of corporate media gatekeepers. But in order to share in the advertising wealth a user base of more than a billion can provide, independent producers like Mr. Pakman must satisfy the demands of YouTube’s unfeeling, opaque and shifting algorithms.” Didn’t see anything about shifting Google algorithms, which can be equally devastating and have been going on for longer.

CNET: Don’t become a Facebook zombie. Get your online affairs in order. “Bite the dust. Buy the farm. Push up daisies. It doesn’t matter what you call it, everyone needs to prepare for the Big Sleep. With more and more of our lives taking place online, that’s become increasingly difficult to do. Think about how many email accounts you have. Who will corral those when you’re gone?”

NBC News: Crackdowns on Social Media Accounts Backfire by Driving up Demand. “Facebook shut down as many as 30,000 fake accounts in the past week — but that’s unlikely to hurt the multi-million-dollar spam industry. In fact, since Facebook’s post-election housecleaning, it’s become even more lucrative for spammers to pump out ‘inauthentic accounts.’ The asking price on the black market for 1,000 fake accounts used to be $20, but security changes by the social network giant only succeeded in driving up prices.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Wordfence: Chrome and Firefox Phishing Attack Uses Domains Identical to Known Safe Sites. “This variant of a phishing attack uses unicode to register domains that look identical to real domains. These fake domains can be used in phishing attacks to fool users into signing into a fake website, thereby handing over their login credentials to an attacker.”

Gizmodo: Police Searching for This Man Who Allegedly Posted a Murder Live on Facebook. “The Cleveland Police Department is searching for a man named Steve ‘Stevie Steve’ Stephens in connection with the murder of an elderly man that was broadcast live on Stephens’ Facebook page. In earlier posts, he claimed to be perpetrating an ‘Easter day slaughter.’ ”

RESEARCH & OPINION

UPI: Study questions doctor judgement on personal social media accounts. “Not even doctors are immune from inappropriate social media posts. Young doctors often have ‘unprofessional’ or offensive content on their Facebook profiles, a new study suggests. The study, of newly graduated urologists, found that nearly three-quarters had publicly identifiable Facebook profiles. And 40 percent of them contained unprofessional or ‘potentially objectionable’ content.” Good morning, Internet…

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