NEW RESOURCES

BBC News: A short history of Life: Afghanistan’s lost magazine. “Bright, busy and colourful, newly digitised pages of Zhvandun magazine – Life, in English – reveal the aspirations of Afghanistan’s elite during decades of political and social change. It rolled off presses through most of the second half of the 20th Century, mixing articles on global affairs, society and history with fun stuff on film stars and fashion. Think, perhaps, of Time magazine with added poetry and short stories.” There are so many images in this story it’s a little annoying, but keep scrolling, there IS an archive link.

Data Driven Journalism: New database showcases collaborative journalism from around the world. “The database launched in early January. It contains information about more than 150 journalism collaborations around the world, and features information including when the collaboration started, who was involved, funding sources, the tools that newsrooms used, and whether the collaboration had a formal arrangement in place or someone in charge of the efforts.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Your Guide to Augmented Reality in The Times. “The New York Times is introducing the newest advance in digital storytelling: augmented reality (AR). This technology uses your phone or tablet to create a bridge between the digital world and the physical one. If photography freed journalists to visually capture important moments, and video allowed us to record sight, sound and motion, then our augmented reality feature goes a step further, making flat images three-dimensional. AR brings our report to you in a way that makes it more immediate than ever before.”

Digital NC: New Issues of the Pilot Now Online . “16 years and over 800 issues of The Pilot have been added to DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Southern Pines Public Library. While we previously held issues of the Pilot from its inception in 1920 to 1948, we now have issues dating to 1965, nearly doubling our collection. Based out of Southern Pines, this newspaper services Moore County.”

USEFUL STUFF

Wired: The Chrome Extensions We Can’t Live Without. “Nearly two-thirds of internet users turn to Chrome for their browsing needs, but far fewer take full advantage of its available extensions, the add-ons that elevate it from good to great. If you’re one of those plain vanilla Chrome users—or if you’ve only dabbled in the extensions game—check out these sprinkles of joy that the WIRED staff swears by.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Columbia Journalism Review: Big tech’s bid to control FOIA. “Facebook isn’t the only big tech firm stifling the FOIA process and obscuring public disclosure by shielding its identity with a code name of sorts. I’ve also found examples in Amazon agreements, which have won $1.2 billion in tax incentives from local and state governments as the company expands its footprint of data and fulfillment centers nationwide. For example, when Amazon negotiates to open a data center, it is rarely, if ever, identified directly as Amazon. Instead, the tech giant negotiates with local officials through its wholly owned subsidiary Vadata, Inc. This makes it difficult for local citizens to immediately know that Amazon, a company worth $656 billion, is the real beneficiary of such generous tax breaks. ”

TechFinancials: A New Social Media Platform, Chomi, to Promote South African Languages. “Chomi, a new South African-based social platform to promote South African languages, has entered the social scene and creating a community that utilises all local languages to chat and share what’s happening in their world. The new social platforms, such as USSD, Chomi.mobi and Chomi App, are available in all official SA languages.”

The Tech (Pakistan): YouTube Just Shut Down The Pakistani Government’s Account Because They Stole A Video. “The official YouTube account of the Government of Pakistan was suspended on charges of copyright infringement after local vlogger, Irfan Junejo, said his footage was used without permission. Junejo, Pakistan’s new frontier on the YouTube scene, is known for his travelogues which have become a viral sensation.”

Mashable: Facebook deletes angry DC fanboy group trying to bring down ‘Black Panther’. “Dear bitter internet trolls who are pissed that Black Panther is already blowing every superhero movie out of the water: boy, bye. That’s basically what Rotten Tomatoes and Facebook told a short-lived campaign to bring down the upcoming film’s audience score before anyone even saw the damn thing. After critics who attended early screenings of Black Panther raved about it on social media, a Facebook group titled ‘Down with Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys”‘ cropped up.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Register: Web searching died the day they invented SEO. “Rather than showing what you’re searching for, search results show you links that marketeers want you click on instead. The whole point of SEO today is to direct you to content you don’t want and didn’t ask for. As a result, I go hunting for a little bit of old zombie satellite code and all I can find are 47,000 links to George A Romero video clips and Walking Dead fan pages. Ho hum, does anyone have any old Fortran manuals?” Funny but some truth in there as well. Good afternoon, Internet…

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