NEW RESOURCES

NurseryWorld: Scottish Book Trust unveils new Song and Rhyme Library. “Housed on the Bookbug website, the new Song and Rhyme Library provides a searchable online catalogue of fun demonstration videos for parents, carers and early years practitioners in Scotland.” There’s not a lot here yet but songs in Gaelic and Scots are available as well as English.

ECNS: China’s famous Terracotta Army gets digital boost. “China’s world famous Terracotta Army attraction has been given a digital boost thanks to the Chinese web-based encyclopedia Baidu Baike, in partnership with the Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum. Together they’ve created a large-scale, high definition ‘digital museum’ for the country’s UNESCO World Heritage site, reports China News Service.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress 4.7.5 is now available. This is a security release so please upgrade as soon as you can.

Neowin: Microsoft announces new Bing features following Build 2017. “Following Microsoft’s annual Build event last week, which was thoroughly covered by Neowin, the company has now announced some new features arriving to Bing. The search engine will now support bots, eSports coverage and search for hiking and camping places.”

Mashable: Facebook just brought all your notifications under one roof. “Facebook’s latest tweak goes beyond just the social network itself — instead, the Facebook team is looking to bring its whole family of apps closer together.”

TechCrunch: Soon you’ll be able to voice chat with YouTube commenters in VR. “Today, Google announced that instead of adding text comments in YouTube VR, the company will be making shared rooms where users can chat by voice in VR. The company didn’t detail whether this would be random users, so we’ll have to see how much auditory spam there’s going to be.” Considering what many YouTube comments are like, this feels like a “two weeks in Philadelphia” kind of thing.

Ubergizmo: Google Allo For Web Release May Take Place In ‘A Month Or Two’. “Google’s Allo communication app is only available for smartphones at this point in time, however, it has been known for quite some time now that a web app is going to be released soon. Google is yet to confirm precisely when that’s going to happen. Allo for the web is now being tested and the latest report is that it’s still ‘a month or two’ from release.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 12 Tools You Can Use to Help Beat Ransomware . “Antivirus software is a continually evolving market. It has to be both proactive and reactive to mitigate new and existing threats. Of course, no antivirus can be 100% secure. And threat actors are clever. They are the reason the cybersecurity sector is set to hit $200 billion in 2021. One of the biggest issues facing home users, business, and enterprises alike is ransomware. And while a ransomware infection is notoriously difficult to fight, it isn’t impossible.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Texas, San Antonio: UTSA researcher examines how city governments use Facebook to engage citizens. “In a recent study, published in Government Information Quarterly, [Chris] Reddick and his colleagues, Akemi Takeoka Chatfield of the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Adeboyega Ojo of the National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland, studied two city departments’ Facebook pages to compare and contrast their approaches and outcomes. The researchers assessed the Facebook pages of the City of San Antonio Solid Waste Management Department and its counterpart in the City of Austin, the Resource and Recovery Department.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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