NEW RESOURCES

Coast Week: UN to launch Chinese-funded digital library on Kenya’s traditional games. “The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will next week launch a digital library on traditional games in Kenya to preserve the cultural heritage. The project, dubbed: ‘Creating Open Digital Library on Traditional Games in Kenya,’ is funded by Chinese tech firm Tencent and is part of a global project launched in 2015 by the UNESCO Office in Beijing.” Why, yes, I do believe that’s the same Tencent that just took a stake in Snap.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Dallas News: Did Jack Ruby know? 10,000 more FBI records unsealed from JFK assassination files. “Yet again, the National Archives released a trove of records from the Kennedy assassination files on a Friday afternoon, another strange stream of loose ends, dead ends and tangents with little apparent connection to the assassination of the nation’s 35th president. Here and there, the odd curiosity did appear, offering insight into the effort to understand the circumstances of Kennedy’s murder but providing nothing to cast the official conclusions into doubt.”

Ancestry:Introducing We Remember – Free Online Memorials. “With We Remember, you can quickly and easily create a free public memorial page for a loved one. Rather than being a research page, the We Remember page is designed to gather and showcase memories about your loved one. You can celebrate their life by bringing together those who knew them and collecting stories, and photos, to paint a rich picture of who they were.”

Engadget: Facebook tests VR in News Feed with ‘Jumanji’ experience. “Since adding 360 videos to News Feeds in June 2016, Facebook has spent this year significantly invested in the format. It enabling 360 livestreaming and then added that functionality within its apps, and even boosted the back end with automatic image correction. But the social network isn’t stopping its immersive push at flat imagery. Today Facebook announced it has started testing VR experiences in users’ News Feeds, and its first experiment is a ‘scavenger hunt’ game for the upcoming Jumanji film.”

The Verge: Google will stop letting sites use AMP format to bait and switch readers. “Google today announced a forthcoming update to its Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, web format that aims to discourage website owners from misusing the service. The company says that, starting in February 2018, AMP pages must contain content nearly identical to that of the standard page they’re replicating.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: How to Read Deleted Reddit Comments. “While browsing through Reddit, you must have seen deleted or removed comments that may have aroused your curiosity. But do you know you can recover most of these deleted comments with the help of third-party tools? In today’s post, I’ll show you four tools that can help you see deleted Reddit comments one way or another. These tools are completely free to use and aren’t illegal as well.” The article notes that deleted content is usually deleted for a reason, and you should expect offensive content.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Hindustan Times: To check encroachment in Old Delhi, officials told to send photos daily on WhatsApp. “In a novel way to keep a tab on unauthorised occupation at sites in Chandni Chowk which were recently made free of encroachment, the Shahjahanabad Redevelopment Corporation (SRDC) has asked officials from North Delhi Municipal Corporation and Delhi Police to send pictures of the sites daily on a WhatsApp group created for smooth coordination among stakeholders.”

New Yorker: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online. “[Roberto] Garcia, known online as Towelliee, is a star broadcaster on Twitch, a streaming platform whose popularity has turned recreational gaming into an improbably viable career. Each month, a hundred million visitors watch their favorite personalities play video games on Twitch, spending an average of nearly two hours a day there. This audience is large enough to make the site one of the twenty most trafficked in the U.S., yet it’s perhaps more apt to measure Twitch against a different medium. With viewership numbers that rival those of MSNBC or CNN, Twitch is less like a conventional Web site than like a kaleidoscopic television network: thousands of channels at once, broadcasting live at every hour of the day.”

Quartz: An internet of things flop means some connected lights won’t work anymore. “Emberlight, a startup that raised $300,000 to make a smart light socket that works with any traditional bulb, emailed its customers Thursday (Nov. 16) to say it was shutting down due to pressure from big competitors and imitators. But unlike a company that sells independently operating computer keyboards, there is a headache for customers with Emberlight smart sockets: every time a customer wants to turn on a light, it requires the company’s cloud service to process the command.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Vox: China is perfecting a new method for suppressing dissent on the internet. “A new study by Gary King of Harvard University, Jennifer Pan of Stanford University, and Margaret Roberts of the University of California San Diego suggests that China is the leading innovator on this front. Their paper, titled ‘How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument,’ shows how Beijing, with the help of a massive army of government-backed internet commentators, floods the web in China with pro-regime propaganda.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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