NEW RESOURCES

Internet Archive: 27 Public Libraries and the Internet Archive Launch “Community Webs” for Local History Web Archiving. “With generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the Kahle/Austin Foundation and the Archive-It service, the Internet Archive and 27 public library partners representing 17 different states have launched a new program: Community Webs: Empowering Public Libraries to Create Community History Web Archives. The program will provide education, applied training, cohort network development, and web archiving services for a group of public librarians to develop expertise in web archiving for the purpose of local memory collecting…. The program will result in dozens of terabytes of public library administered local history web archives, a range of open educational resources in the form of online courses, videos, and guides, and a nationwide network of public librarians with expertise in local history web archiving and the advocacy tools to build and expand the network. ”

Google Research Blog: Google-Landmarks: A New Dataset and Challenge for Landmark Recognition. “Today, we are excited to advance instance-level recognition by releasing Google-Landmarks, the largest worldwide dataset for recognition of human-made and natural landmarks. Google-Landmarks is being released as part of the Landmark Recognition and Landmark Retrieval Kaggle challenges, which will be the focus of the CVPR’18 Landmarks workshop. The dataset contains more than 2 million images depicting 30 thousand unique landmarks from across the world (their geographic distribution is presented below), a number of classes that is ~30x larger than what is available in commonly used datasets. Additionally, to spur research in this field, we are open-sourcing Deep Local Features (DELF), an attentive local feature descriptor that we believe is especially suited for this kind of task.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: LittleThings blames its shutdown on Facebook algorithm change. “A recent Facebook algorithm change seems to have claimed a high-profile casualty: LittleThings, a digital publisher focused on inspirational and how-to content for women, which shut down yesterday. I wrote about the company at the beginning of 2016, when it raised debt funding from City National Bank. At the time, it seemed to be flying high, becoming one of the largest lifestyle publishers online and, according to one report, publishing the single most popular Facebook post in 2015.”

USEFUL STUFF

ProBlogger: When DIY Blogging isn’t for You: 5 Alternatives to Self-Hosted WordPress. “Many of the world’s largest blogs and websites run on self-hosted WordPress. Thousands of plugins and themes are available – many for free, although there are lots of premium options too. And a self-hosted blog gives you full control and plenty of flexibility. But for some bloggers, self-hosted WordPress might not be the best choice.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Today Online: In Italian election campaign, Facebook, Twitter replace posters, piazzas . “The Italian election campaign is different from those of years past when the streets were lined with political posters and leaders rallied voters up and down the country. The placards are few and far between and the only large rallies were held during the final week of the campaign for the March 4 vote. But in the virtual world, Facebook and other social media are full of political content.”

The Daily Beast: YouTube Won’t Ban Neo-Nazi Group Chanting ‘Gas the K**kes, Race War Now’. “While social-media platforms like Twitter crack down on abuse from alt-right accounts, YouTube is defending hosting propaganda videos from extremist groups that have been kicked off other sites. Neo-Nazi groups like the Atomwaffen Division still have active YouTube presences, despite YouTube users reporting the videos for violating the site’s policies against hate speech. YouTube knows about the videos—and it’s keeping them up, the site told The Daily Beast.”

Los Angeles Times: Snap is said to skip bonuses and struggle with low morale after hard year. “On Wednesday, Snap Inc. sent employees a survey asking a broad set of questions to understand what they’re happy about, what they want to improve, and what they want to say, anonymously, one year after the Snapchat maker’s initial public offering. Grievances will be aired.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: ‘Bro Culture’ Led to Repeated Sexual Harassment, Former Google Engineer’s Lawsuit Says. “Loretta Lee, a software engineer who worked at Google for seven years before being fired in February 2016, is suing Google for sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful termination she says she experienced at the company. Lee says in her lawsuit that the company’s ‘bro-culture’ led to continuous harassment and that Google did nothing to intervene.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NPR: Scientists Aim To Pull Peer Review Out Of The 17th Century. “The technology that drives science forward is forever accelerating, but the same can’t be said for science communication. The basic process still holds many vestiges from its early days — that is the 17th century. Some scientists are pressing to change that critical part of the scientific enterprise.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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