NEW RESOURCES

Digital Library of Georgia: Scrapbooks from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra documenting the Civil Rights Era are now available online. “In partnership with the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives (Music and Broadcasting Collections) the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) has digitized 24 scrapbooks from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO) Collection dating from 1945-1985 that are now available online as part of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Collection.”

13 News Now: Virginia launches website to help people stay informed about voting, elections process . “The Virginia Department of Elections launched a website to help people stay informed about voting and the elections process. The department said the ‘Vote with Confidence’ site has information about when and where people can vote, how Virginia conducts its elections, and key dates and deadlines.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tubefilter: With A Year Of Shorts Under Its Belt, YouTube Is Still Figuring Out Creator Monetization. “One year ago, YouTube debuted the first public version of its TikTok copycat, Shorts. Between then and now, the platform expanded Shorts to all YouTube users around the globe, launched a $100 million fund to pay some of the users making content for it, and saw the average number of daily first-time creators uploading videos to Shorts more than double. So, what has it learned?”

BNN Bloomberg: Google Quietly Tweaks Image Search for Racially Diverse Results. “Google updated its algorithms in an effort to promote more racially diverse results in image searches — the tech giant’s latest attempt to excise biases from the world’s most popular search engine.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: Google Photos’ unlimited free storage is gone. Here’s how to get more space. “Google Photos ended its unlimited free storage policy for photos and videos as of June 1. Now any new photos and videos you upload will count toward the free 15GB of storage that comes with every Google account. But don’t worry: The photos or videos you uploaded before then won’t be part of the cap. And Google has added a new free tool to help you manage your storage quota.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Foreign Affairs: The Technopolar Moment: How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order. “The aftermath of the January 6 riot serves as the latest proof that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are no longer merely large companies; they have taken control of aspects of society, the economy, and national security that were long the exclusive preserve of the state. The same goes for Chinese technology companies, such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. Nonstate actors are increasingly shaping geopolitics, with technology companies in the lead. And although Europe wants to play, its companies do not have the size or geopolitical influence to compete with their American and Chinese counterparts.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: U.S. bill would stop Big Tech favoring its own products. “About a dozen U.S. senators from both parties on Monday formally introduced a bill that would bar Big Tech platforms, like Amazon AMZN.O and Alphabet’s GOOGL.O Google, from favoring their products and services.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of New South Wales: Life’s a beach: finding trends in marine debris across Australia. “More than 2000 organisations and 150,000 citizen scientists have participated in the Australian Marine Debris Initiative [AMDI] by sorting and tallying up marine debris they have collected since it was set up by the not-for-profit Tangaroa Blue Foundation in 2004. Now a study led by UNSW Science has filtered and analysed 10 years of the AMDI Database and created a national map of patterns in marine debris.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

University of Toronto: From colour-changing lizards to ‘buff’ birds, U of T students create fun, science-focused trading cards . “Inspired by the Pokémon collectible trading cards of their childhood, University of Toronto biomedical communications students Shehryar (Shay) Saharan and Michie (Xingyu) Wu developed the BMC SciCard Collaborative project.”

Rock Paper Shotgun: Tweet2Doom lets you play Doom via Twitter. “Doom is now playable on Twitter – sort of. Thanks to Tweet2Doom bot, you can send replies to the account with a list of actions – move, turn, shoot, etc. – and get a video clip of Doom showing the results sent back to you.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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