NEW RESOURCES

Bangor Daily News (Maine): WPA Cemetery Plans Online!. “Many Maine cemeteries have plans originally created courtesy of the Works Progress Administration, which reside at the Maine State Archives. Thanks to that staff and the folks who work on Digital Maine, all 543 of those images may be seen at the touch of a button or two!”

Google Blog: Make your own data gifs with our new too. Yes, it says “too”. I’m sure it’s a typo and “tool” was meant. “Data visualizations are an essential storytelling tool in journalism, and though they are often intricate, they don’t have to be complex. In fact, with the growth of mobile devices as a primary method of consuming news, data visualizations can be simple images formatted for the device they appear on. Enter data gifs.”

Library of Congress: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Now Online . “The Library of Congress has placed online nearly 25,000 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which depict the structure and use of buildings in U.S. cities and towns. Maps will be added monthly until 2020, for a total of approximately 500,000. The online collection now features maps published prior to 1900. The states available include Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Alaska is also online, with maps published through the early 1960s. By 2020, all the states will be online, showing maps from the late 1880s through the early 1960s.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Next Web: Snapchat launches a design studio for custom geofilters. “Snapchat introduced the ability to let you create your own Geofilters – effects that are only available in specific physical locations – early last year, but you had to be familiar with design tools like Photoshop or Illustrator in order to make anything decent. Fret no more: you can now create your own filters from scratch right from your browser.”

TechCrunch: Facebook’s personal fundraisers exit beta, now support raising money for sports teams & communities. “Facebook announced today it’s expanding its online fundraising tools – basically, Facebook’s own take on a GoFundMe-type service – to include support for community fundraisers as well as those for sports teams. The company had first launched its personal fundraising tools in March of this year, allowing users to raise money for educational, medical or pet medical needs, public crises, natural disasters, personal emergencies, and funerals or loss.”

Ubergizmo: Instagram Direct Now Has Support For Landscape And Web Links. “Instagram has rapidly been adding new features to its apps to enhance functionality for users. We’ve seen the Facebook-owned service add several new features over the past few weeks. It has made another feature-related announcement today. Instagram Direct, the service’s direct messaging platform, has received two new features today which include support for landscape and portrait orientations and web links.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Underpaid and overburdened: the life of a Facebook moderator. “Psychologists say that the emotional toll of looking at extreme imagery, whether violent terrorist acts or child sexual abuse, can be punishing. Workers exposed to such content should have extensive resiliency training and access to counsellors, akin to the support that first-responders receive. However, testimony from those working to keep beheadings, bestiality and child sexual abuse images off Facebook indicates that the support provided isn’t enough.”

Wired: Facebook Claims It Has a Better Way to Prove Ads Work on Facebook. “Facebook’s first-ever State of the (Measurement) Union event in New York City today is meant to mollify marketers still worried about issues with transparency. The plan? Convince them that metrics don’t matter at all.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Dark Reading: 82% of Databases Left Unencrypted in Public Cloud. “The average lifespan of a cloud resource is 127 minutes. Traditional security strategies can’t keep up with this rate of change, and 82% of databases in the public cloud are left unencrypted. These findings come from the RedLock Cloud Security Intelligence (CSI) team’s ‘Cloud Infrastructure Security Trends’ report.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

Well, *I* thought it was funny. From the New Yorker: Social-Media Creation Myths. “Twitter is a beautiful, magical bird trapped in the body of a Web site by a jealous underworld demigod. The billion billionth time that Twitter is refreshed, the bird will return to her original form and ascend to the sky, borne aloft by a billion billion joules of subtweets.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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