NEW RESOURCES
The city of Savannah Georgia’s Civic Magazine now has a digital archive available at the Digital Library of Georgia. Just to make things as confusing as possible, Civic Magazine is not in fact a magazine; it was a TV program. “According to Luciana Spracher, the library and archives director for the City of Savannah, Research Library and Municipal Archives, ‘Civic Magazine was one of the earliest programs of the City of Savannah’s Government Channel 8, the city’s cable access channel now called SGTV 8, run by the City of Savannah’s Public Information Office (PIO).'” If you’re ever in Georgia I encourage you to visit Savannah; it’s a beautiful city.
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
GlaxoSmithKline and Alphabet are teaming up to create a new company. “GlaxoSmithKline and Google parent Alphabet’s life sciences unit are creating a new company focused on fighting diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body, jump-starting a novel field of medicine called bioelectronics. Verily Life Sciences – known as Google’s life sciences unit until last year – and Britain’s biggest drugmaker will together contribute 540 million pounds ($715 million) over seven years to Galvani Bioelectronics, they said on Monday.”
Twitter has announced its first annual Twitter Awards. “We at Twitter want to recognize the advertisers that have really stood out over the past year. Because, let’s face it, when you look at the current advertising landscape, there are so many innovative, imaginative, and impactful things happening on Twitter.” Oh, I’d say there were some impactful things happening on Twitter, all right….
Apparently Yahoo is testing a new search interface? Why…? “The new interface moves the Yahoo logo from the left side of the search box, all the way to the right side. It also adds a menu to the right that opens various new options from Yahoo. Finally, the search button is blue instead of purple.”
USEFUL STUFF
From the always-useful Social Media Examiner: How to Use Facebook Live From Your Desktop Without Costly Software. Walks you through setting up and using the free OBS Studio software (works with Windows, Mac, AND Linux!)
From Wired: how to watch the Olympics on all your devices. Looks like it’s going be a lot easier than Olympics past.
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Scots folk! Google wants you to help it learn your dialect. “The three-hour task, which has to be completed by August 6, offers payment of £30 for children, and £27 for adults who carry out the task.”
From MIT Technology Review: Google and Microsoft Want Every Company to Scrutinize You with AI. “Rob Craft, who leads product management for Google’s cloud machine-learning offerings, says that most companies are in a position to benefit from machine learning right away because they have a lot of data on hand about their operations, business, and customers…. The most straightforward of the new services offered by Google and others do things like describe the content of images, transcribe audio files such as phone calls, extract key terms from text, or translate text between languages. Although seen as lagging behind Google in machine-learning technology, Microsoft and IBM have so far rolled out the broadest range of such services, known as APIs.”
The Library of Congress has a fascinating blog post about a collection of newspaper clippings about World War I. “World War I news, editorials, features, cartoons, photos, maps, and more are also contained in a unique 400 volume 80,000-page set of newspaper clippings found within the collections of the Library of Congress Serial and Government Publications Division. The set, ‘World War History: Daily Records and Comments as Appeared in American and Foreign Newspapers, 1914-1926,’ was created after the war through the dedicated direction of Otto Spengler, owner of the Argus Press Clipping Bureau.” Plans are underway to digitize this remarkable resource!
SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES
Facebook has been ordered to refund parents for accidental in-game purchases by their kids. “The decision is the culmination of a class action lawsuit started in 2012 by two children and their parents. The suit was over purchases of the since-discontinued virtual currency Facebook Credits – now known as Facebook Payments – which the kids purchased with the parents’ credit cards and without the parents’ knowledge or authorization.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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