TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Facebook restores policy it ‘lost’ three years ago. “Last month, Facebook’s Oversight Board chastised the company for losing an important policy for three years. At the center of the ruling was an Instagram post about Abdullah Öcalan, which encouraged people to talk about his political imprisonment.”

SlashGear: Microsoft is giving OneNote a fresh design and version tweak. “During the pandemic, many people who never used Microsoft OneNote in their working lives have begun using the application to take notes and to view shared notes from their supervisors in many companies. With the increased popularity of OneNote, Microsoft has taken the time to talk about some changes coming to the application for Windows over the next year. The updates include a major visual refresh for the service.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Video Tips: 15 Ideas for More Engagement. “Creating a message that captivates people is critical. The most crucial factor when it comes to creating engaging Facebook videos is exactly that: engage the user. And you have just seconds to do it. Here are a few methods that can result in greater overall engagement for your Facebook videos.”

Lifehacker: What I’ve Learned About Working Out in VR. “I set out to learn whether virtual reality games can give you a good workout, and last week you heard about a bunch of my favorites. Now that I’ve adventured through the virtual world, I have returned to you with opinions.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Arizona State University: ASU Library awarded $249K digital preservation grant. “Stacey Erdman, digital preservation and curation officer and acting digital repository manager for the ASU Library, will serve as the principal investigator of the three-year grant and manager of the multi-organizational project, which will deliver an innovative digital preservation training program to practicing librarians and archivists struggling to provide ongoing care for their digital collections.”

How-To Geek: The First Website: How the Web Looked 30 Years Ago. “Titled ‘World Wide Web,’ the world’s first public website served as a bare-bones introduction to the concept of the web itself for those outside of CERN who might have been interested in the technology. Amazingly, CERN still hosts a copy of the site that you can view in your modern browser, which reportedly dates to some time in 1992. Sadly, though, the original December 1990 version is lost to history.”

The Drum: China explores restricting social media algorithms to promote ‘culture and art reviews’. “China is looking at how it can limit the role of algorithms in content distribution to align online content with the state’s agenda in order to shape the country’s minds and mainstream views.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Home Depot Tech Will Brick Power Tools If They’re Stolen. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? . “Thanks to internet connectivity, hardware you own can be bricked or downgraded to the point where you lose essential features. Or, just as often, obnoxious DRM means you have to jump through all kinds of bizarre hoops to actually use the thing you thought you owned, whether that’s Keurig using DRM to prevent you from using competing coffee pods, to printer manufacturers using DRM to keep you from buying cheaper cartridges. Now Home Depot is experimenting further with DRM at the point of sale.”

The Verge: Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow lawsuit has unearthed a huge problem with streaming. “This summer’s biggest Hollywood attraction is a multimillion-dollar battle between two of the industry’s best-known players: Scarlett Johansson and Disney. Johansson sued Disney last week over its day-and-date release of her Marvel superhero film Black Widow, which put the movie on Disney Plus the same day it hit theaters, potentially depriving her of a huge box-office-infused paycheck. The aftermath has been chaotic, but it’s more importantly illuminated the myriad ways that streaming has forever changed the way we experience movies and the implications for the creatives and talent who make them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Limerick Post: MIC researcher awarded multi-national funding for innovative research into online communications. “MARY Immaculate College (MIC) Applied Linguistics researcher, Dr Anne O’Keeffe, has been awarded significant funding to investigate whether the sudden shift to virtual communications in the workplace has impacted how we communicate.”

The Next Web: Algorithms are providing a way to fairly select citizens’ assemblies. “In the UK and France, for example, citizens’ assemblies have been convened to deliberate responses to climate change. But selecting the members of these bodies is a complicated task. Ideally, citizens’ assemblies should be both representative and randomly selected. Balancing these two requirements is challenging as the volunteers tend to be unrepresentative of the whole population.”

SEO Roundtable: Microsoft Bing Announces Make Every Feature Binary (MEB). “Microsoft announced their next AI model, a large-scale sparse model that complements our production Transformer models, they are calling MEB or ‘Make Every Feature Binary.’ ​Microsoft said this makes the search results on Bing more relevant. In fact, MEB is running in production for 100 percent of Bing searches, in all regions and languages.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!