NEW RESOURCES

Boston Globe: Salem State to create digital humanities network. “Salem State University plans to spearhead a new initiative to promote education and advancements in digital humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities is providing the university with $40,000 to create a network of public, regional universities that will share best practices in adopting, teaching, and research in the growing field, which refers to the use of computer technology to help teach subjects such as history and literature.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digiday: Facebook will ‘completely deprioritize publishers’: Confessions of a publisher audience development head. “Many of the publishers that spent 2016 and 2017 investing in Facebook products like Instant Articles and news feed videos enter the new year with new perspective on the relationship they have with the world’s largest social platform. For the latest installment of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, we spoke to an audience development head at a midsize digital publisher that resisted the temptation to go all-in on those products. The conversation has been condensed.” Please don’t tell me you’re shocked by this.

USEFUL STUFF

TechWorld: 8 Chrome extensions that supercharge Google Drive. “Google Drive is useful all by itself, but a number of Chrome browser extensions add more functions to Google’s cloud storage and office apps service. I covered several of these add-ons for Chrome in a previous article, ‘8 free Chrome extensions that enhance Google Drive.’ Following is a fresh batch of Chrome extensions that can improve how you work with and manage files in Google Drive.”

Digital Inspiration: How to Embed MP3 Audio Files In Web Pages with the help of Google Drive. “Audio hosting websites like SoundCloud or Anchor.fm make it easy for you to embed audio files in your web pages and blogs. Just upload your file – like an MP3 song or an audio podcast – to any of these sites and they’ll provide the HTML embed code that you can copy-paste in your web template. Simple! If you have been storing your MP3 files inside Google Drive, you can embed the files directly from Drive without having to upload them to another website.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Business Insider: Mark Zuckerberg’s personal challenge for 2018 is to fix all the bad things happening on Facebook. “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal challenge for 2018 is to fix issues like abuse, hacking from other countries, and other nefarious practices on Facebook. In a post on his Facebook page Thursday, Zuckerberg wrote that ‘we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools.'” Mmm hmm. Good luck with that.

New York Times: Internet Users in China Expect to Be Tracked. Now, They Want Privacy.. “China’s biggest online payment company offers its hundreds of millions of users a breakdown on their spending each year, showing everything from their environmental impact to their ranking among shoppers in their area. Many spenders — not shy, and occasionally even a bit boastful about their personal finances — in turn share the details on social media. This year, the marketing stunt has run into a problem: China’s growing sense of personal privacy.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Next Web: Reddit admits its email provider was hacked to steal Bitcoin Cash tips. “Following a brigade of spooked Redditors reporting hacked accounts and missing Bitcoin Cash tips, Reddit has now revealed the results of its internal investigation – and it doesn’t look good. A hacker purportedly breached the platform’s third-party password reset system, forcing access to the accounts of multiple victims.”

ITPro Today: Critical CSRF Security Vulnerability in phpMyAdmin Database Tool Patched. “phpMyAdmin has been dealing with a critical CSRF security vulnerability. The timing on this is lousy, coming on a day when every admin and DevOps on the planet is scrambling to patch every Intel machine against Meltdown, while trying to figure out what it will mean to have every server in the data center taking a 5-30 percent performance hit. The problem with security issues is that they’re rarely polite enough to surface when it’s convenient.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

And now for your weekend ridiculousness, from Techdirt: White Noise On YouTube Gets FIVE Separate Copyright Claims From Other White Noise Providers. “The implications of YouTube’s ContentID system in an era of user-generated content can sometimes be quite muddy. It is widely known that ContentID is open to abuse, and that it is indeed abused on the regular. However, too many stories about that abuse play far in the margins of what the average person could look at and recognize as a very real problem. This is not one of those stories.”

Phys.org: Where is AI headed in 2018? Your phone will know you better than your friends do, researcher predicts. “To get a sense of where the field is headed in 2018, U of T News sat down with the University of Toronto’s Richard Zemel, a professor of computer science and the research director at the Vector Institute for artificial intelligence research….Zemel’s take? Get ready for a world where businesses enjoy unprecedented insight into their products and services, Toronto continues its ascent as a major AI research hub, and digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa become ultra-personalized.”

ReviewGeek: Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Is Completely Busted. “We can complain about it all we want—may I suggest a good rant on Facebook?—but at the end of the day, Facebook’s News Feed is designed to keep you idly scrolling past things you kind of like but can’t look away from, rather than keeping up with the people you care the most about and then moving on with your day. If you want to see the most important stuff to you, you’re better off subscribing to news sites in Feedly, following public profiles on Twitter, or just texting your friends and family and ask how they’re doing.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

UVA Today: Into The Darkness: UVA Robot Maps Historic Tunnel. “Nicola Bezzo is using robots to map the past. Bezzo, a University of Virginia assistant professor in the departments of Systems and Information Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and two of his graduate students, Esen Yel and Tony Lin, have had a hand in mapping the Blue Ridge Tunnel, a railroad passage cut through Afton Mountain. Claudius Crozet engineered the tunnel, which was completed in 1856.” Good morning, Internet…

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