NEW RESOURCES

Gothamist: A Nearly Forgotten Photo Archive Becomes A Vivid Exhibit Of Chinatown’s Past. “Although planned prior to the pandemic, the exhibit has landed at a precipitous moment for Chinatown and Chinese New Yorkers…. Old photo tours of New York City are well-mined territory. But the nostalgia kindled by Bocian’s black and white photos of old storefronts, like that of Hop Shing, a coffee shop and dim sum restaurant known for its pork and coconut buns, has only intensified in light of COVID. Hop Shing closed finally in September, one of many Chinatown businesses felled by the crisis.”

TechCrunch: Podchaser raises $4M to build a comprehensive podcast database. “Podchaser, a startup building what it calls ‘IMDB for podcasts,’ recently announced that it has raised $4 million in a funding round led by Greycroft. In other words, it’s a site where — similar to the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database — users can look up who’s appeared in which podcasts, rate and review those podcasts and add them to lists. In fact, CEO Bradley Davis told me that the startup’s “vibrant, exciting community of podcast nerds” have already created 8.5 million podcast credits in the database.”

Washington Secretary of State: Breaking News! More Historic Washington Newspapers Online. “Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, has digitized over 450,000 pages of historic Washington newspapers for the WDN website, including over 27,000 new issues that have just been released and are now available and free to the public.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

USA Today: Joe Biden committee to roll out inauguration-themed AR lenses for Snapchat. “The inauguration committee for President-elect Joe Biden will roll out augmented reality lenses on Snapchat on Wednesday to help users celebrate the transition of power from afar.”

VentureBeat: Opera acquires YoYo Games for $10 million and launches Opera Gaming division. “Web browser maker Opera has acquired YoYo Games, maker of the GameMaker Studio 2 game engine, for $10 million, and it has also launched its Opera Gaming division. The deal underscores Opera‘s efforts to differentiate its web browser, Opera GX, through a gaming community. Opera itself has more than 380 million people using its web browsers worldwide, but the new Opera GX gaming browser has seven million monthly active users as of December, up 350% from a year earlier.”

Vintage Motorsport: The Henry Ford Achieves Digitized Artifacts Milestone. “For nearly a decade, The Henry Ford has worked to digitize its unparalleled collection of artifacts that tell the story of America’s traditions of ingenuity, resourcefulness and innovation in order to make them more accessible, to educate and inspire those around the world. The organization has now digitized its 100,000th artifact – fittingly, a photograph of the 100,000th Fordson Tractor.”

USEFUL STUFF

NixIntel: Make Your Own Internet Archive With Archive Box. “Hunchly is excellent for capturing web pages, but I still like to supplement it with YouTube-dl for grabbing video content. Recently I’ve also started using Archive Box to build offline archives of web content that I want to keep…. Archive Box can build full archives of the websites listed in your bookmarks, browser history, or from a list of custom URLs that you provide. In the rest of this post I’ll show you how you can set up and install Archive Box and start to archive your own pages.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling. “Every morning, Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer and actress, wakes up in her Upper East Side apartment; feeds her dog, Milo, and her cats, Marlena and Celeste; brews a cup of coffee; and sits down at her oval dining room table. Then, she opens her laptop and begins fighting the global cabal.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Biden as president: What it will mean for tech. “Even though tech policy didn’t dominate election issues, Biden’s presence in the Oval Office over the next four years will have a major influence on the sector, including infrastructure policy on broadband deployment and national security issues involving China. The president and his team will also play a role in how to handle the growth and influence of social media giants. Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies are already feeling the heat from politicians on both sides of the political aisles.”

ABC News: Washington, Oregon, 29 tribes sue over plan to move archives. “Washington, Oregon, more than two dozen Native American and Alaska Native tribes and cultural groups from the Northwest are suing the federal government to stop the sale of the National Archives building in Seattle, a plan that would force the relocation of millions of invaluable historical records to California and Missouri.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NiemanLab: The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth. “The next few years will undoubtedly be met with massive efforts to rebuild the infrastructure of truth in the U.S. This will happen; it is a natural and inevitable reaction. Fake news will not dominate our infoscapes forever. It won’t go away completely, but it will become more marginal, because there’s been a change in the leaders we have elected to power. But a simple repair to the infrastructure of truth won’t be enough to do the trick. We must work together to make the infrastructure of truth less vulnerable.”

Business Insider: Google says it is investigating an AI ethicist for sharing sensitive documents, amid bristling tensions between employees and leadership. “Google has suspended the corporate account of Margaret Mitchell, a lead on its ethical AI team, claiming she downloaded and shared sensitive documents with external accounts. A Google spokesperson confirmed late on Tuesday that Mitchell’s corporate access, including her work email, had been locked.” Good morning, Internet…

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