NEW RESOURCES

Digital Journal: New website launched for easy conversion of cryptocurrency and world currency. (PRESS RELEASE). “A new website has been launched for easy accurate and powerful online currency conversion. The website CurrencyConvert.online has been designed to convert as many as 2636 conventional currencies and cryptocurrencies conveniently. The website supports 60 languages.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BetaNews: Ubuntu Linux 18.04 Bionic Beaver is here — download it now!. “Today, following an extensive beta period, the latest version of Ubuntu — version 18.04 — becomes available for download. Code-named ‘Bionic Beaver,’ it features GNOME 3.28 — the best desktop environment — rather than the now-abandoned (and much-maligned) Unity. As per usual, there are other DEs too, such as KDE, Xfce, and MATE. ”

CNET: Flickr’s future under SmugMug control: What you need to know. “If your own photos are among the tens of billions at Flickr, the photo-sharing service SmugMug agreed to acquire from Verizon’s Yahoo, you might be wondering about now what will become of them. When announcing the acquisition deal Friday, SmugMug made it clear it’s not folding Flickr into its existing photo-sharing business or scrapping a brand established in 2004. But Flickr’s future is up for discussion now, and some photographers are uncertain and worried.”

Fast Company: Digg Was Just Bought By An Ad-Tech Company Called BuySellAds. Ewww. “Last month, Digg, an old beloved content aggregation destination, made the sad announcement to its loyal following that it was shutting down its RSS platform, Digg Reader. This wasn’t merely a product decision, it turns out, but a development as the company transitioned to a new parent company.”

TechCrunch: Facebook shrinks fake news after warnings backfire . “Tell someone not to do something and sometimes they just want to do it more. That’s what happened when Facebook put red flags on debunked fake news. Users who wanted to believe the false stories had their fevers ignited and they actually shared the hoaxes more. That led Facebook to ditch the incendiary red flags in favor of showing Related Articles with more level-headed perspectives from trusted news sources.”

USEFUL STUFF

Popular Science: How to finally organize your contact list. “….the apps that store contact lists—we’re focusing on those from Google, Apple, and Microsoft—can help you clean up duplicates, delete contacts with missing or outdated information, and sync these changes between apps and devices. In general, to avoid having your contacts list sprawl across too many accounts, we’d recommend that you pick one of these contacts services to serve as your primary account, based on the apps and devices you rely on the most (heavy iPhone users should go through Apple, Android devotees should pick Google, and so on). Once you’ve selected a platform, use the native tools we’re about to discuss to whip your contacts in shape. Then head to the final section of this guide to make sure those cleaned-up contacts will appear across all the platforms you use.”

Amit Agarwal: How to Backup your Gmail Inbox to another Gmail Account . “If your current Gmail account is running low on storage, you can consider using a new Gmail account to backup your existing emails and then delete the bulky mails from the primary account to make space. There are no addons to install and the Gmail-to-Gmail transfer happens directly in the cloud.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Hyperallergic: Bringing Our Social Media Spaces and Selves into the Gallery. “[Frankie] Toan’s ‘This is How I See Your House’ (2018) is a plush and heavily patterned living room that no one lives in, though it bares the traces of many inhabitants. Complete with a stuffed chair, plant, and a window, the installation is a composite based on content from 32 Instagram followers of Vicki Myhren Gallery and the artist. Framed photos on the walls show Toan’s infinity mirror, in which real living rooms are cut and pasted into virtual ones, and recast into a physical space again.”

Columbia Journalism Review: Why you think social media is run by interns. “It’s almost like publishers want readers to think it’s an intern tweeting—because an intern means someone young, funny, and relevant. It’s a fantasy where only the youngest people in the office know how to ‘do’ social media, and therefore the ‘fun’ task of posting on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all day is thrust upon the person at the bottom of the totem pole. At one point, these people were right. Ten years ago, and less, when publishers didn’t know the power of social media, it may very well have been an intern holding the reins. But in 2018—where we now have a president who tweets out official policy—the business of social media has become so complex that it is now a bona fide profession.”

Reuters: Amazon ad sale boom could challenge Google-Facebook dominance. “Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) expanding business of selling space on its site to merchants helped it double profits on Thursday, and some see the move as a step towards taking advertising dollars from Google and Facebook Inc (FB.O).”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Mashable: Here’s why you’re getting all those terms of service update emails. “Get the feeling you’re suddenly being bombarded with emails from companies about updated terms of service policies? You are. And there’s a good reason: the European Union’s forthcoming efforts to protect our personal data.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Web Science and Digital Research Group: Why we need multiple web archives: the case of blog.reidreport.com. “This story started in December, 2017 with Joy-Ann Reid (of MSNBC) apologizing for ‘insensitive LGBT blog posts’ that she wrote on her blog many years ago when she was a morning radio talk show host in Florida. This apology was, at least in some quarters, (begrudgingly) accepted. Today’s update was news that Reid and her lawyers had in December claimed that either her blog, and/or the Internet Archive’s record of the blog had been hacked (Mediaite, The Intercept).” A deep dive into the technical aspects of a very distasteful situation. Good morning, Internet…

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