NEW RESOURCES

Internet Archive: TV News Lab: Hyperaudio improving TV news video captioning and sharing. “In a new blog series, TV News Lab, we’ll demonstrate how the Internet Archive is partnering with technology, journalism, and academic organizations to experiment with and improve the TV News Archive, our free, public, online library of TV news shows. Here we interview Mark Boas, founder of The Hyperaudio Project, an organization that works to make audio and video more accessible and shareable on the web, by providing an easy-to-use interface for copying and pasting bits of transcripts to create mash ups of shareable video.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Google Classroom now lets anyone school anyone else. “Google Classroom is opening up even further: After allowing anyone to join classes last month, expanding the learner side of the equation beyond just those with G Suite for Education accounts, Google is now opening Classroom class creation to anyone with a personal Google account, too.”

SEO Roundtable: Google Updates The How Search Works Site. “Google noted in their project Owl announcement that they also updated their How Google Search Works site. The site was first introduced in March 2013 and had some content and feature revisions over the years. It now has been totally redesigned and a lot of the content has been removed or hidden in other places.”

Google Blog: Discover more of the things you’re into with Topics on Google+. “Millions of people use Google+ to connect around the things they’re interested in. To help you sort through the many Collections and Communities where people share, we’ve created a new feature called Topics. With Topics, you’ll see a high-quality stream of Collections, Communities and people related to things we think you’ll be interested in.” The three people I used to hear from regularly on G+ are not nearly as active as they used to be.

USEFUL STUFF

The Verge: Exif is a clever tool that stops people from stealing your photos. “Exif applies an embedding-as-sharing model to photography. Upload your photos to Exif and it will generate HTML-based embed codes that websites can use to put your photos in a post. It replaces the standard way of doing things, which usually requires someone who works for said website to download that photo and upload it to their own hosting service or CMS. These steps sometimes strip out the image’s metadata, and they also introduce break points in the process where that person’s carelessness could mean the photographer never receives (or has to fight for) proper credit and compensation.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Artnet: MFA Boston Is the Latest Museum Driven Crazy by Instagram Censorship. “Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is stuck in a stalemate with Instagram after photos from its latest exhibition—a survey of decorous abstracted nudes by Imogen Cunningham—were censored by the image-sharing app, and the museum’s pleas to have its artwork allowed on social media have gone unheard.”

New York Times: He Tweeted About Chinese Government Corruption. Twitter Suspended His Account.. “Twitter on Wednesday briefly suspended the account of a Chinese-born billionaire who was using the social media service to publicize allegations of corruption against top Communist Party officials.” If that headline sounds familiar it’s because the same guy was recently accidentally (allegedly) suspended from Facebook and the NYT ran a story on it with a similar headline.

The Telegraph: Government ‘blocked’ from accessing Twitter data to help spot terrorist plots. “Twitter has blocked the Government from accessing data on potential terrorist threats in a move that ministers fear will make the country less safe, industry sources have told The Telegraph. The social media platform has withdrawn access to key streams of information which help the police and MI5 to identify plots, under plans to stop user data being used for ‘surveillance’.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Fortune: Exclusive: Facebook and Google Were Victims of $100M Payment Scam. “When the Justice Department announced the arrest last month of a man who allegedly swindled more than $100 million from two U.S. tech giants, the news came wrapped in a mystery. The agency didn’t say who was robbed, and nor did it identify the Asian supplier the crook impersonated to pull off the scheme. The mystery is now unraveled. A Fortune investigation, which involved interviews with sources close to law enforcement and other figures, has unearthed the identities of the three unnamed companies plus other details of the case.”

TechCrunch: Government requests for Facebook user account data up 9% in second half of 2016, but content restrictions declined . “Facebook today released its latest report on global government requests for the second half of 2016, noting there has been a 9 percent increase in requests for user account data compared with the earlier part of that year, but a 28 percent decrease in content restrictions for violating local law. However, that latter decrease doesn’t necessarily indicate that content restriction-related requests are dropping as a trend, but rather that earlier reporting had been impacted by unusually inflated figures.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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