NEW RESOURCES

Independent Online: WATCH: Inside Google South Africa and SA Tourism’s new initiative to entice travel. “Google Arts & Culture and South African Tourism launched South Africa: An Explorer’s Paradise, an online exhibition that showcases the best of the famed destination. The initiative, which boasts a collection of 500 images and videos, 55 Street Views and 20 digital stories, is set to entice domestic and international travellers to plan their SA getaway.”

Gothamist: Newly Digitized Photos Take You Back To Central Park In The 1980s. “When the Central Park Conservancy formed and began transforming the park in 1980, the group also started documenting everything that was happening inside of its perimeter walls. These early years were all captured with black & white film, and more recently they’ve been digitizing the old shots, which number in the tens of thousands.”

Cavalier Daily: Law School launches new website exploring its connections to slavery. “The University’s Law school launched Slavery and the U.Va. School of Law — a new website and digital archive that explores the law school’s historical connections to slavery — on Feb 1. At the core of this project are digitized versions of law students’ notebooks from the antebellum time period, when slavery was taught as a social good.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Australia passes new law requiring Facebook and Google to pay for news. “The country’s unprecedented new law had been hotly debated in recent months. Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL) had opposed the initial version of the legislation, which would have allowed media outlets to bargain either individually or collectively with them — and to enter binding arbitration if the parties couldn’t reach an agreement.”

Gizmodo: Microsoft’s Latest Product Goes Toe-to-Toe With Squarespace. “Microsoft is officially getting into the website-building biz. On Wednesday, the company’s digital marketing wing rolled out a shiny new suite of tools which promise to give businesses a quick and easy way to set up their own landing pages. And unlike some of the other site builders on the market—like, say, Squarespace or Wix—Microsoft’s new platform is entirely free.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Confuse Google Ads With This Chrome Extension. “You can try to combat data-collection in all kinds of fun ways, including manually blocking or clearing the data companies have on you and preventing yourself from being tracked as much as possible with various adblockers, anti-tracking extensions, and privacy-themed browsers, but considering the number of systems out there tracking you, those methods can only be so effective. AdNauseum works on a different principle.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Times of India: Indian Newspaper Society asks Google to raise publisher share in ad revenue to 85%. “INS has asked Google to compensate the Indian newspapers ‘comprehensively’ for using contents published by them and to share its advertising revenues properly.
‘The Society insisted that Google should increase the publisher share of advertising revenue to 85 per cent, and also ensure more transparency in the revenue reports provided to publishers by Google,’ said INS in a statement.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Google withdrawal threats could result in antitrust backlash: Vestager. “European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager warned of potential antitrust action against Google or other US technology giants if they threaten to pull out of markets. Vestager told the European Parliament’s economy committee on Tuesday that there could be scope for ‘investigating if it’s actually legal for a dominant provider to stop supplying’ services, adding that the EU ‘would have a number of tools to use.'”

Reuters: Justice Department gives judge big Google document request. “The Justice Department asked the judge hearing its antitrust fight with Alphabet’s Google for a huge list of documents from the search and advertising giant, including some about Facebook and Google’s Chrome browser, according to a court filing on Wednesday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Engadget: What’s going on at Google AI?. “AI and ML systems have advanced in both sophistication and capability at a staggering rate in recent years. They can now model protein structures based only on the molecule’s amino-acid sequence, create poetry and text on par with human writers — even spot specific individuals in a crowd (assuming their complexion is sufficiently light). But for as impressive as these feats of computational prowess are, the field continues to struggle with a number of fundamental moral and ethical issues.” Good evening, Internet…

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