NEW RESOURCES

DPLA: Sunshine State Digital Network Brings Florida’s Collections to DPLA. “We are pleased to announce that over 74,000 new materials from Florida’s Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN) are now discoverable in DPLA. Please join us in welcoming SSDN partners Florida State University, University of Miami, and Florida International University to the DPLA network.”

Berkeley: Voices in Confinement: A Digital Archive of Japanese American Internees. “The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Digital Archive is the result of a two-year grant generously funded by the National Park Service as part of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. The grant titled, ‘Voices in Confinement: A Digital Archive of Japanese American Internees’, includes approximately 150,000 original items including the personal papers of internees, correspondence, extensive photograph collections, maps, artworks and audiovisual materials.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Get local help with your Google Assistant. “No matter what questions you’re asking—whether about local traffic or a local business—your Google Assistant should be able to help. And starting today, it’s getting better at helping you, if you’re looking for nearby services like an electrician, plumber, house cleaner and more.” Hopefully the problems with spam and scams for people looking for local businesses – do a search for google maps locksmith scam – have been resolved.

Mashable: Facebook launches new tool to help connect users with mentors. “Mentors often play a crucial role in helping people achieve their goals. Now, Facebook wants to help foster those relationships all in one place. The social media giant launched a new product Wednesday called Mentorship and Support, which will connect users with mentors to get the advice and support they need. The aim is to bring together people who have shared experiences and goals but don’t already know each other.”

Linux Journal is apparently shutting down. “It looks like we’re at the end, folks. If all goes according to a plan we’d rather not have, the November issue of Linux Journal was our last. The simple fact is that we’ve run out of money, and options along with it. We never had a wealthy corporate parent or deep pockets of our own, and that made us an anomaly among publishers, from start to finish. While we got to be good at flying close to the ground for a long time, we lost what little elevation we had in November, when the scale finally tipped irrevocably to the negative.” Support the small publications you love, y’all. Or they die.

I Programmer: Amazon Glacier Select Analyzes Archived Data. “Amazon Glacier, which we reported when it was announced in 2012, is intended for data archiving and online backup, with storage costs of as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. It is optimized for infrequently accessed data where a retrieval time of several hours is suitable. Glacier Select, The new tool, announced at AWS re:Invent 2017, can be used to run queries directly on data stored in Glacier, retrieving only the data you need out of your archives to use for analytics.”

USEFUL STUFF

Gizmodo: Use This Tool to See If Your Name Was Used to Support Net Neutrality Repeal. “So far, the FCC has refused to cooperate with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation into identity theft during the commenting period on net neutrality repeal. So Schneiderman is using the internet to find the evidence and he needs help.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ABC Online (Australia): Battling with old technology to keep State Library of WA’s digital archive alive. “We usually think of digital records as accessible, up to date and easy to store. But for the preservation staff at the State Library of Western Australia, saving this type of content has proven far trickier than simply keeping mildew away from books.”

SEO Roundtable: Matt Cutts Dislikes How Google Links To Search Results. “Matt Cutts, former Google executive and star amongst the SEO community, posted on Google+ how he is not happy with how Google is linking to the ’10 blue links,’ the core Google search results. Matt showed how Google is not directly linking from the core search results to the site. Instead, they are adding a bunch of parameters to the URLs for tracking purposes.” Good on Matt for speaking up, but hasn’t this been the case for a while? Google’s search result URL links have been dreadful for at least a few years if I remember correctly.

Politico: John Kelly’s losing battle with Trump’s Twitter feed. “When John Kelly accepted the position of White House chief of staff last July, he framed his main function as imposing order, including instituting a formal process for the documents and news articles that reached the Resolute Desk. But President Donald Trump’s increasingly incendiary Twitter feed, which remains outside Kelly’s control, has short-circuited that attempt at creating a functional system for controlling the flow of information into the Oval Office.”

The Japan News: Suicide solicitations pose problems for social media. “Recently, people seeking partners with whom to commit suicide have become less likely to use so-called ‘suicide websites’ for that purpose and more likely to use Twitter and other social media. Many messages looking for people who want to commit suicide are posted there. The National Police Agency has categorized such posts as “harmful information,” but it is difficult to delete them completely under the current circumstances.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Next Web: Facebook is still relevant, kids. “Facebook revolutionized the world by changing the way people communicate. With over two billion users, it’s now the world’s largest social network. But since 2014, Facebook has been the victim of a troubling pattern: declining reach among its younger audience. The social network has become a place for parents and grandparents to share their pictures, jokes and inspirational quotes. And for me, an adult at 23, it’s where I get my memes — yet teens don’t seem to find any fun in this. But that doesn’t mean Facebook hast lost its value, in fact, over the years it’s only become more ingrained in society.” Good morning, Internet…

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