NEW RESOURCES

The Royal Society: Our new archive is live and free to use. “Like most publishers, our content didn’t publish online first until 1997, so we have been busy updating the earlier content to make it easier to search, find and explore. In previous blog posts about the project the team have talked about the digitisation process, how we have made decisions about metadata, and the importance of language. For us this has been a massive undertaking as our content dates back to 1665!” This massive new collection is free to use until January 24th. So get some use out of your holiday break. Right?

New York Times: Netflix for Jazz? Quincy Jones’s Qwest TV Takes Concerts and Films Digital. “For much of jazz’s history, devotees discovered music over the radio airwaves and in library stacks, rooting out old LPs or videos to borrow and sample. Today, a lot of that exploration happens online — particularly on YouTube. Most major albums have found their way onto that streaming platform, as have concert bootlegs, studio sessions and old documentaries that were once impossible to track down. Now a new video platform is seeking to raise the bar, offering a curated library of high-quality video content from across the jazz world.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Daily Dot: Instagram is testing a new standalone messaging app. “Instagram appears to be getting serious about its in-app messaging. Beginning in six countries, Instagram is testing out a new standalone messaging app called Direct. The app handles all the previous messaging capabilities you had in the main Instagram app. It also removes the inbox from the old app.”

USEFUL STUFF

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 5 Great Kids Digital Libraries . “Here are five web platforms where you can access a wide variety of books and other reading materials designed specifically for kids. Features provided differ from one platform to the other. Some of these platforms provide kids with personalized recommendations based on kids reading levels, others feature rewarding systems to encourage kids to read and provide teachers and parents with tools to track kids reading. We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback.”

Lifehacker: This Tool Lets You Examine Tons of Amazon Product Reviews at Once. “Thinking of spending a pretty penny on that shiny new gadget? Well, you might want to take a look at some Amazon reviews first so you know what you’re getting into. If the thought of digging through hundreds of reviews sounds like a chore, though, this free tool will make it easy.”

Wired: How To Encrypt All Of The Things. “CRYPTOGRAPHY WAS ONCE the realm of academics, intelligence services, and a few cypherpunk hobbyists who sought to break the monopoly on that science of secrecy. Today, the cypherpunks have won: Encryption is everywhere. It’s easier to use than ever before. And no amount of handwringing over its surveillance-flouting powers from an FBI director or attorney general has been able to change that.”

Gizmodo: How to Avoid Getting Tracked as You Browse the Web. “As privacy barriers have gradually been eroded online, it’s become harder and harder to keep control over what you’re revealing to the websites you visit when you open up a web browser. For many users now, revealing who you are is just an inevitable consequence of being on the web and using apps, but if you want to tighten the reins on where your data’s going, you do have some options.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Atlantic: Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet, and That’s Okay. “In a new paper, ‘Stewardship in the ‘Age of Algorithms,’’ Clifford Lynch, the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, argues that the paradigm for preserving digital artifacts is not up to the challenge of preserving what happens on social networks. Over the last 40 years, archivists have begun to gather more digital objects—web pages, PDFs, databases, kinds of software. There is more data about more people than ever before, however, the cultural institutions dedicated to preserving the memory of what it was to be alive in our time, including our hours on the internet, may actually be capturing less usable information than in previous eras.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNBC: Facebook and YouTube are full of pirated video streams of live NFL games. “Pirated video streams of televised National Football League games are widespread on Facebook and on Google’s YouTube service, CNBC has found. Using technology from these internet giants, thousands of football fans were able to watch long segments of many contests free of charge during the league’s Week 13 schedule of games last Thursday and Sunday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Harvard Business Review: Is It Time To Break Up Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google?. “With the United States Justice Department’s objection to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, we are being reminded that antitrust activity is not dead. It makes one wonder if some of the biggest names in tech might now be vulnerable.” Interesting comments – at this writing, at least. Good afternoon, Internet…

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