Of course I got sick last night. Of course I did. There was no alcohol involved, either. Guess I’m just lucky. Anyway, I had to go out today because I was not going to start the new year by disappointing my Granny, and I promised myself that whatever I could do for RB while locked up with Eggo for her medications, I would do. This I have done. So I’m sending it out, giving Eggo her meds, and crawling back to bed. Hoping to get back to normal eventually.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: US Army bans TikTok app from government phones. “The US Army has banned TikTok from use on government phones, reversing its policy on the entertainment app, which it recently used as a recruiting tool. The move, reported earlier by Military.com, follows guidance from the Pentagon.”

Morning Picker: New Disney filters are now available on your favorite social media platform-“Instagram”. “The filter is generated as one uses it in a selfie mode on Instagram stories. The users can check out the multiple Disney characters matching themselves with the characters like Simba from The Lion King or Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: Google’s Mueller Answers How to SEO a Podcast Site. “In a Reddit discussion someone asked how to optimize an audio based site that featured podcasts and audiobooks. John Mueller and others in the Reddit community provided useful advice.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Route Fifty: Data Evangelists Spread the Word on Boosting Government Performance. “It was almost like an old-time revival, but with a modern twist, when former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley was the keynote ‘preacher’ at a recent event on the use of data, mapping, and analytics as the new way of governing for results. He spoke at an informal, semi-annual gathering of local government chief performance officers, hosted by Marc Erlich, county executive for Montgomery County, Maryland.”

Engadget: YouTube’s burnout generation. “Since about 720,000 hours of footage — equivalent to more than 82 years — are uploaded to the site daily, a major decider in whether a video gets seen (and thus how much a YouTuber gets paid through AdSense advertising revenue) is its appearance on the site’s front page or ‘up next’ column. But despite constant theorizing and probing, most creators are in the dark about what it takes to get their videos surfaced, leaving them in constant insecurity that they might wake up one day to be invisible and irrelevant.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Brazil fines Facebook $1.6 million for improper sharing of user data. “Brazil’s Ministry of Justice said on Monday it fined U.S. tech giant Facebook Inc 6.6 million reais ($1.6 million) for improperly sharing user data.”

CNN: Microsoft takes away 50 websites from a North Korean hacking group. “Microsoft has been granted a court order to take over 50 websites it alleges were used by a North Korean hacking group to steal “highly sensitive information” from computers in the United States.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Twitter Made Us Better . “Rightful critiques of social media, and Twitter in particular, shouldn’t obscure the significance of the conversations that have happened there over the past 10 years. As we enter 2020, powerful individuals and societal problems can no longer avoid public scrutiny. That’s thanks in part to those who have demanded attention through the website.”

WAtoday: ‘Being offline is a massive luxury’: The case for a half-hearted digital detox. “Man Repeller calls it being ‘medium online’. That is, the ability to use social media when it suits us, and disengage when it doesn’t. To decide our own boundaries around what we will and won’t share and reconfigure technology into our life in a way that is healthy and realistic. Consider it a half-hearted digital detox.” Good evening, Internet…

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