NEW RESOURCES
The government of Saudi Arabia has launched a new site which provides information on Saudi courts. “The new portal is accessible via the [Minister of Justice] website and allows people to follow-up and evaluate the number of received cases and how many of them are finalized each day. People have access to employee workloads, the number of meetings and average periods for the completion of cases.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
The State Archives of North Carolina have added more World War I materials to its online archives. It looks like it’s mostly correspondence.
The latest Web service to get two-factor is WhatsApp. “WhatsApp users are beginning to see an option for two-factor authentication their account settings folder. According to Android Police, the feature is live in the most recent betas of the app (2.16.341 and above), and has also been spotted in the Windows Phone beta. Once activated, the app will prompt a user for a static six-digit passcode every time a new phone is registered to the account.”
Congratulations to the Toronto Public Library for reaching 100,000 items in its digital collection. That photo archive looks terrific.
Chrome has hit two billion installs. “In April this year, Google came out with a blogpost where it had revealed that Chrome had crossed 1 billion monthly mobile users. Besides this, the post had also informed that 771 billion pages load each month, which is pretty much same the number of pages in over 821 million dictionaries.”
Google will not build an ad-blocking feature into Chrome. (If it did, considering the two million installs, that would be about it for advertising.) “This year, the Opera browser added an option to block online ads. The newer Brave browser goes farther, blocking them by default. But Google would rather fix the problems with ads than strip them off websites.”
Adobe is acquiring TubeMogul. “TubeMogul specializes in video advertising and offers advertisers a demand-side platform (DSP) to plan, buy, and measure video ads using an automated (programmatic) system. TubeMogul will sit within Adobe’s Marketing Cloud business.”
USEFUL STUFF
From Flowingdata: Resources to Find the Data You Need, 2016 Edition. “Before you get started on any data-related project, you need data. I know. It sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. It can be frustrating to sleuth for the data you need, so here are some tips on finding it (the openly available variety) and some topic-specific resources to begin your travels. This is an update to the guide I wrote in 2009, which as it turns out, is now mostly outdated. So, 2016. Here we go.” Not a huge list but a good starting point.
Marketing Land: Pinterest & Snapchat: 12 tips to dial in your visual ads. “By this point, we’ve all traded enough Facebook advertising Q4 tips (raising hand) to write a few books on the subject. If you’re not using all the tools in Facebook’s ROI kit in the next few weeks through the busy holiday shopping season, you don’t have many excuses. But what about for the newer social platforms that don’t have as many best practices in circulation? For retail clients especially, there’s still time to make hay in Q4 on Pinterest and Snapchat.” YMMV but it seems like holiday ads just ramped up ridiculously yesterday morning.
Don’t like Facebook’s new “shouty” statuses, where short updates are rendered in a huge font? There’s a fix for that. “Facebook has quietly introduced a new feature that has confused and even offended some of its users worldwide. A status post of less than 35 characters now appears in a larger and bolder font – a move reportedly intended to help it ‘stand out’ from longer, wordier posts.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
TechCrunch: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform. “Facebook has responded to widespread criticism of how its Newsfeed algorithm disseminates and amplifies misinformation in the wake of the Trump victory in the US presidential election yesterday.” I think the news stories attributing PE Trump’s victory solely to Facebook are silly. But Facebook does have an obligation to do better — much better than it has so far in filtering out silly or fake information.
SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES
Mashable: Moscow court threatens to block LinkedIn in Russia. “If LinkedIn loses a battle over violations of a Russian law governing personal data, the nation’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, could block the professional networking site. Russia’s personal data law requires companies to keep Russians’ personal data within the country, a difficult requirement to uphold for most foreign companies and social networks.” Good morning, Internet…
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