TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Twitch will stream the ’80s arcade gaming show ‘Starcade’ . “Starcade, the ’80s TV show that had participants compete in arcade video games, will be back by the end of August. No, not as a reboot, which is in the works, but as a Twitch marathon. The video gaming platform has teamed up with Shout! Factory, the studio that acquired the rights to create the reboot, to stream all 123 episodes of the original show. Starcade ran from 1982 to 1984 on TBS and featured arcade classics like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga and Centipede.”

CNET: Telegram now sends disappearing messages, just like Snapchat. “The app now lets you send your friends ‘self-destructing’ photos and videos that disappear after a few seconds, the company said in a blog post yesterday. How long it takes for the media to go away depends on how long you set the timer for.”

USEFUL STUFF

Joyce Valenza: Natural Reader and other free text-to-speech tools. “I’ve been working on gathering resources on for our new Emerging Literacies course and wanted to share some of the resources/app lists I’ve gathered for learners with special needs. Among the tools I am discovering are a few free resources for supporting text-to-speech. These resources are so handy for struggling readers, for ESL students, for students with visual and physical disabilities and for busy graduate students and teachers who need to read and cook/or drive at the same time.”

Lifehacker: Manage And Unsubscribe From All Your Online Accounts With This App . “Signing up for an online account is something we do so often that we lose track of all the websites we’re subscribed to…. But there are many online tools that can help you clean up your footprint online. A new tool I recently came across is Deseat.Me, a web app that scans your email accounts for services you’ve signed up for, and then puts them on a list for you to delete or keep.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Tech.co: How Live Streaming Is Disrupting Asian Markets. “The live streaming boom has certainly had a huge impact in the west. However, what many people may not know is that this trend is affecting Asian markets just as strongly, in fact more so. It is predicted that within the next year, it will be a $5 billion industry in China alone. What’s even more interesting is the fact that it isn’t exclusively the expected players, like YouTube and Periscope, that are conquering Asian markets. There’s plenty of disruption afoot. Let’s explore what’s impacting all of this.”

Tubefilter: Oxygen To Promote New True Crime Series By Letting Reddit Users Question Famous Jurors. “NBCUniversal’s Oxygen recently rebranded to focus on true crime content, and one of its new shows in that genre is The Jury Speaks, which features perspectives from people who served on the juries of famous court cases. To promote that show, Oxygen is running a clever promotion online: It will bring some of its featured jurors to Reddit, where they will field questions posed by the website’s IAMA community.

BetaNews: No, Google is not about to redesign its iconic minimalist homepage . “The idea that Google would change the minimalist design of its homepage is a strange one. The clean, stripped-back look recognizes the fact that people go there to conduct searches and nothing else. To start introducing feeds would be very strange.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

John Bowers at Harvard: A Million Squandered: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact. “While most of the graphical elements on the Million Dollar Homepage are promotional in nature, it seems safe to say that the buying craze was motivated by a deeper fixation on the site’s perceived importance as a digital artifact. A banner at the top of the page reads ‘Own a Piece of Internet History,’ a fair claim given the coverage that it received in the blogosphere and in the popular press….But to what extent has this history been preserved? Does the Million Dollar Homepage represent a robust digital artifact 12 years after its creation, or has it fallen prey to the ephemerality common to internet content?” If you want an exhibit A to the problems of digital impermanence and linkrot, READ THIS.

The Register: DeepMind says it’s given AI an imagination. Let’s take a closer look at that. “Google’s AI boutique, DeepMind, known for dispelling human delusions of intellectual superiority by soundly beating the world’s top Go players with computer code, has found that instilling its software agents with something like imagination helps them learn better.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Is The SEO Industry Doomed With So Many Departures Recently? . “In the past couple months or so, we had some significant departures of key personalities from the SEO industry. First with Danny Sullivan retiring, then with the news around Rand Fishkin leaving Moz and then Matt McGee leaving Search Engine Land. Before that, we had Maile Ohye leave Google, Matt Cutts officially leave Google, Amit Singhal leave Google and many others. We also had some big departures on the paid search side with Larry Kim leaving his company, WordStream. Of course, this month, I received dozens of questions from around the industry asking me if I am leaving also.” I hope Barry doesn’t go anywhere. There aren’t meany voices in SEO I trust and his is one of them. Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!