NEW RESOURCES

Google Blog: Chopin Forever: a digital retrospective on Google Arts & Culture. “Did you know that Chopin was a child star? He was writing and composing poetry at the age of 6, and performed his first public concerto at the age of 7. By the time he was 12, Chopin had already performed in the drawing rooms of countless Polish aristocrats and created multiple original compositions This is just a snippet of what you’ll discover through ‘Chopin Forever’, an original online retrospective dedicated to the life, legacy and music of Chopin — brought to life through a collaboration between The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, twelve partners in 6 different countries and Google Arts & Culture.”

Flood Magazine: KCRW Announces Audio Documentary Series on Deirdre O’Donoghue. “Hosted by Tricia Halloran of KCRW’s ‘Brave New World,’ the series will feature interviews with artists recollecting their time on the DJ’s original radio series ‘SNAP!’ (an acronym for “Saturday Night Avant Pop”), including Julian Cope, Michael Stipe, Henry Rollins, Syd Straw, Glass Eye’s Brian Beattie and Kathy McCarty, Dave Newton of Mighty Lemon Drop, David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven, and many of the other artists who squeezed into her studio to perform on her late night show.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Politico: Facebook lobbying surges to $5M amid whistleblower uproar. “The $5.1 million spree outpaces the company’s big tech peers Google, Amazon and Microsoft. In fact, the only entities that outspent Facebook on lobbying for the quarter were the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, Business Roundtable and the drug lobby PhRMA, according to disclosures filed late Wednesday.” That’s for a quarter of the year. A quarter.

CNET: Google cuts subscription-based service fees for Play Store apps in half . “Effective Jan. 1, Google is decreasing the service fee it collects from subscription-based apps in the Play Store from 30% to 15%, the company announced Thursday via its blog for Android developers. The new rate will be effective for all apps on day one, the announcement reads — that’s a change from the current structure, which requires subscription-based apps to retain their customers for a year in order to enjoy a lower rate.”

ZDNet: This new Google Docs feature will let you add a lot more stuff to your documents. “Google has announced the Docs ‘universal @ menu’ as a way for adding everything from tables, images, to formatting by typing ‘@’. This feature is an expansion of existing ‘smart chips’ integrations. Google earlier this year launched smart chips, a new @ tag tool for linking information from other Workspace apps to a Docs file. It’s Google’s bid to change the word-processing experience.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: New political ad strategy in Virginia: Promoting news articles in Google search results. “Democratic Virginia governor candidate Terry McAuliffe’s campaign is using Google ads to promote articles from news organizations, but swapping the original headlines on the search results page with ones written by the campaign itself — a novel political advertising method.”

Financial Times: Facebook confronts growth problems as number of young users in US declines. “Internal documents show that the number of US Facebook users under 30 is in decline and that Instagram, which has been phenomenally popular since being bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1bn, appears to be reaching the limits of its growth among younger users in key markets, raising serious questions about the company’s future. Now, one of the company’s solutions to its growth challenges — encouraging users to open multiple accounts — is causing technical, reputational and legal headaches.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Governments turn tables on ransomware gang REvil by pushing it offline. “The ransomware group REvil was itself hacked and forced offline this week by a multi-country operation, according to three private sector cyber experts working with the United States and one former official.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Reuters: AI can see through you: CEOs’ language under machine microscope. “Executives, beware! You could become your own worst enemy. CEOs and other managers are increasingly under the microscope as some investors use artificial intelligence to learn and analyse their language patterns and tone, opening up a new frontier of opportunities to slip up.”

Mashable: Twitter study says its algorithm favors right-wing parties and news outlets. “A Twitter study and accompanying blog post, published Thursday, show that the company’s algorithm tends to favor right-leaning news outlets and right-wing political parties. In other words, long-disputed claims of anti-conservative bias on social media couldn’t be further from the truth.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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