NEW RESOURCES

PRNewswire: Tiny Archipelago Creates Faroe Islands Translate to Petition Google Translate to Share Their Language (PRESS RELEASE). “Creating their very own version of the online translation service, with the help of locals who will translate live by video, Faroe Islands Translate will provide a free online service for those visiting the destination or, in fact, anyone around the world curious to learn a little of this unusual language…. By visiting the new website, and typing the words to be translated into the Faroe Islands Translate search box, the translation will be made by a local volunteer like Guðrun. A video with the translation will be sent back so that people will not only be able to learn the words in Faroese but also see a local speaking the language.” That is really cool. The site already has tons of videos of people speaking Faroese phrases.

Houston Chronicle: Three maps; three different ways to see Houston after Harvey. “Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott gave the City of Houston a $50 million check to continue its long road to recovery. One neat way to see where the funds might be going is through the recently launched ‘Harvey By The Numbers’ web site, a series of interactive heat maps that show what happened to Houston during Harvey and how officials are responding after the hurricane.”

Mental Floss: This New Web Tool Shows How Your Favorite Film Franchises Stack Up. “Using data from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and box office totals, the finance website visualized the top 30 film franchises to see how the installments of each one stack up. The project yielded some surprising results, like that in longest franchises, the eighth title tends to make the most money on opening weekend. Harry Potter, Star Trek, and Star Wars all follow this trend. But according to the numbers, the same can’t be said for quality. The ratings of blockbuster franchises, both viewer-generated (IMDb) and critic-generated (Rotten Tomatoes), are lowest for the most recent installments. Mission Impossible is one exception, with the third and fourth films earning the most critical praise.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Says They Are Not Done Announcing Future Algorithms. “Early on, Google simply did 30 day Google Dances, so it was clear when Google did an update. After that we had updates like Florida and many others that Google did not confirm or talk much about, but we knew there were major changes. Then Matt Cutts at Google shared very specific details on updates around Panda, Penguin, EMDs, and many others. In fact, he would give us the percentage of change Google noticed in the search results around them. Now we are back to a point where the only changes Google is communicating are major indexing issues, like the mobile first index and such.”

Axios: Facebook tells advertisers more scrutiny is coming. “Facebook is going to require ads that are targeted to people based on ‘politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues’ to be manually reviewed before they go live, according to an email sent to advertisers and obtained by Axios. That’s a higher standard than that required of most Facebook ads, which are bought and uploaded to the site through an automated system. It’s also warning that it expects the new policy to slow down the launch of new ad campaigns.”

USEFUL STUFF

Poynter: The ultimate guide to bust fake tweeters: A video toolkit in 10 steps. “This video toolkit is intended to help you debunk dubious tweets. It was first developed in research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Arena Program at the London School of Economics to detect Russian social media influence during the German elections. It was also the basis for a related BuzzFeed article on a Russian bot farm and tweets about the AfD  — the far-right party that will enter the German parliament for the first time. But first: Where do these bots come from?” Lots of text in addition to the video, REALLY extensive.

TechCrunch: Comparing Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and Siri smart speakers. “The smart home assistant race has been building to a fever pitch over the course of the last couple of years. Things really came to head this past two weeks, when Amazon, Google and Sonos all held big events highlighting their latest smart speaker plays, making the already busy field a heck of a lot more crowded.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Asbarez: How Turkey Destroyed or Disposed Its Historical Archives and Documents. “For several decades, the Turkish government and its propagandists have been announcing that the state documents, particularly the Ottoman archives, are fully open and available to any researcher from around the world. What Turkish officials and their supporters do not say is that many documents of the Ottoman archives have been removed, destroyed, sold or disposed of. In addition, some of the most sensitive archives are still closed to outsiders.”

Public Technology: How The National Archives is digitising 1,000 years of history. “There can be few, if any, public bodies for whom the concept of ‘digital transformation’ will be quite so transformative as The National Archives. The organisation, a non-ministerial government department sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, manages hundreds of millions of documents spanning 1,000 years of British history. Its headquarters in Kew, in west London, requires well over 100 miles of shelving to store all these records – with another mile needed each year. All of which adds up to a pretty hefty digitisation project.”

The Guardian: Google Maps leaves visitors to Australian lighthouse town in the dark. “There is nothing particularly special about Adam Gilliver’s house on the Victorian coast, except that it sits a bit further back from the road compared with the homes of his neighbours. And that Google Maps thinks it’s a lighthouse.”

The Guardian: Say moo! Why Instagram loves life on the British farm. “Instagram often gets criticised for triggering Fomo or self-esteem issues, but staring at images of belted galloway calves in the Yorkshire dales could inspire an unfamiliar calm instead. Around the country, farmers are using the app to connect not only with fellow farmers but also with fans of their animals, the rural lifestyle or simply just the picturesque landscapes they capture.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Gravwell Blog: Discovering truth through lies on the internet – FCC comments analyzed. “For this post, the Gravwell analytics team ingested all 22 million+ comments submitted to the FCC over the net neutrality issue. Using Gravwell we were able to rapidly conduct a variety of analysis against the data to pull out some pretty interesting findings. We scraped the entirety of the FCC comments over the course of a night and ingested them into Gravwell afterward. It took about an hour of poking around to get a handle on what the data was and the following research was conducted over about a 12 hour period. So we went from zero knowledge to interesting insights in half a day. We’re kinda nerding out about it.” Good morning, Internet…

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