NEW RESOURCES

DigitalNC: 16 Wilmington newspapers from the 19th century now on DigitalNC. “This fall, as a continuing part of our work with this group, we were pleased to make available 16 newspapers published in Wilmington during the 19th century, ranging in dates from 1803 to 1901. Some of the papers have several years of content available and several have just an issue or two. But together, they paint a rich picture of what life in Wilmington looked like during the 1800s and the wide variety of political viewpoints that were held in the city, and North Carolina as a whole. The papers shed light on a port town that was instrumental in the Civil War and in the politics of Reconstruction afterwards, which culminated in the infamous riots of 1898.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Quartz: Yahoo Finance has a plan to become the Uber of saving money. I think we need to stop saying things are going to become the “Uber” of anything — unless we’re trying to drag them. “The company is rolling out an app today (Jan. 19) called Tanda, an electronic money pool: Users can join groups of five or nine people to meet short-term savings goals, like putting away money for a vacation or building up an emergency fund. Users pay installments into a pot for a set period of time and can choose when they receive their money. The first two-people to get their money pay a fee, while the last to receive a payout gets a small bonus.”

TechCrunch: Twitch partners with Disney Digital Network on content, adds software for broadcasting pre-recorded videos. “On the heels of Twitch’s exec shakeup yesterday which saw the Amazon-owned streaming site adding a new COO, the company today announced a multi-year partnership with Disney Digital Network to bring several top creators to its site. The company also debuted new software for all creators that will allow them to broadcast pre-recorded content to their channels.”

Los Angeles Times: Facebook to start ranking news sources on trustworthiness. “Trustworthiness is based on a recent survey of U.S. Facebook users that gauged their familiarity with, and trust in, different sources of news. The results will inform the company’s ranking in the news feed, a stream of updates people see when they log in. News sources should also be ‘informative’ and relevant to people’s local communities, the company said Friday. The move seems geared toward helping Facebook avoid perceptions of bias in selecting which news providers to highlight.”

BetaNews: Twitter admits that 670,000 people interacted with Russian propaganda bots during US election . “Twitter has revealed that a total of 677,775 Americans followed accounts or liked tweets associated with Russian propaganda groups during the 2016 US election. The company does not reveal how many people saw the tweets posted by these accounts. That Russia tried to use Twitter — and other social networks — to influence the outcome of the US election is hardly news, but there has been an ongoing investigation trying to determine the scale of the operation. In its latest announcement, Twitter also says that it closed 50,258 accounts with links to Russia.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Make Calendar Events Inside Gmail With Pod. “Gmail and Google Calendar integration is an embarrassment. Gmail can never recognize all the crucial event info, and to fix it, you have to open up Google Calendar in a new tab, defeating the purpose. Thankfully there are third-party fixes, like Pod for Gmail, which recognizes event info and loads it into a full calendar event right inside your Gmail window.”

Poynter: This tool makes editing podcasts just as easy as editing text. “It’s an understatement to say that podcasting has exploded over the past few years. Though the format has existed for more than a decade, shows like ‘Serial’ and ‘The Daily’ ushered in a golden age of audio. Podcasts have a low barrier to entry. With a little audio editing knowledge and some free software, almost anyone can make one. But a new tool eliminates that barrier entirely by opening up podcast editing to anyone who knows how to edit text.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Hyperallergic: How a Blind Professor Is Helping Other Sight-Impaired Museum Visitors Experience Art. “Over the past decade Georgina Kleege has offered consultations to art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Modern, on how to make their art accessible for blind people. An English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Kleege recently published More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, a book about how blindness is represented in art and how it affects the lives of visual artists. Kleege, who is blind and has been on many touch tours of museums, has long seen the potential for institutions to do more. The daughter of a painter and a sculptor, she grew up going to artists’ studios, galleries, and museums, and has advocated for such spaces to go beyond ramps and ADA compliance.”

Global Voices: Why Wait? Wikipedia and Google Accidentally Declare Putin the Winner of March 2018 Presidential Elections . “Russia’s presidential elections are two months away, and while there are multiple contenders, the expectation is that Vladimir Putin will secure a fourth term handily. On January 15, in what looked like an effort to save time or skip the nail-biting drama of counting votes on election night, Google declared Putin the winner of the March 2018 election.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Sixth Tone: Shanghai Police Busted 390 Cases of Fake News on Social Media. “If you believed all the fake news stories from China in 2017, you would have a bleak impression of the country as an absurd, chaotic place. From children dying from sun exposure after stealing fruit to government-mandated evacuations of Chinese nationals from India, the year was rife with rumor. On Wednesday, Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper reported that the internet issues division of the Shanghai police investigated and closed 390 cases related to online rumors in 2017.”

Ars Technica: Malicious Chrome extension is next to impossible to manually remove. “Proving once again that Google Chrome extensions are the Achilles heel of what’s arguably the Internet’s most secure browser, a researcher has documented a malicious add-on that tricks users into installing it and then, he said, is nearly impossible for most to manually uninstall. It was available for download on Google servers until Wednesday, 19 days after it was privately reported to Google security officials, a researcher said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Engadget: Wikipedia explains how those late-night reading binges happen. “Everybody’s prone to falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking link after link until it’s been hours since you’ve started our journey. Now the foundation has begun releasing monthly data dumps for English, Russian, German, Spanish and Japanese Wikipedias that can give you a better understanding of how readers end up navigating from one article to the next. The Wikimedia Analytics team worked on being able to release datasets every month after seeing how the similar set of info released in 2015 led to a number of scholarly research studies.” Good morning, Internet…

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