Dennis Cooper is getting his blog back. “Artist and author Dennis Cooper re-launched his popular blog on Monday after months of legal disputes with Google, who many accused of censorship. The artist posted a message on the blog’s Facebook account on Friday to explain Google’s reasoning for erasing his 14-year-old blog, which housed a gif novel he was working on.”
What’s the state of the search engine market? Search Engine Land has the skinny. “Writing about search market share on the desktop is now a bit like writing about old cars. It’s sort of interesting but less and less relevant. For reasons that remain mysterious, comScore has neglected to provide a unified view of the search marketplace — despite the fact that likely between 55 and 60 percent of search queries now come from mobile devices.”
Weird, WEIRD story over at Search Engine Roundtable: The Deceased Leaving Negative Google Reviews? “William Rock posted in the Google My Business Help forums evidence that shows that deceased people are coming back to life to post negative reviews of businesses in their Google business listings. If you look at this business you will see a review left by Emma Aronson three weeks ago, it even has her profile picture. But that Emma Aronson lost her life over a year ago, so how did she leave a review just a few weeks ago?” This is super weird and I look forward to seeing Google’s response.
Twitter will start sharing ad revenue with video creators. “Making money on Twitter just got a whole lot easier. The company announced today the launch of its Amplify Publisher Program, which will give creators of all sizes the ability to generate revenue through pre-roll ads that run against their Twitter videos.”
Google is opening up a ride-share program. “Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., began a pilot program around its California headquarters in May that enables several thousand area workers at specific firms to use the Waze app to connect with fellow commuters. It plans to open the program to all San Francisco-area Waze users this fall, the person said. Waze, which Google acquired in 2013, offers real-time driving directions based on information from other drivers.”
Google has an OnHub update. “Today, we’re celebrating OnHub’s first birthday and announcing a new partnership with Philips Lighting, the first connected home device you can control directly with OnHub. We know people don’t like having too many apps on their phones, so we made it possible to control your home’s Philips Hue lights without downloading an app. Now anyone connected to your OnHub can type “On.Here” in a computer, tablet, or mobile browser and control the most popular features of your Philips Hue lights from there. Crank up the party lights!”
The city of Burbank (California) has a new digital archive of photos. “Though the database includes hundreds of photos saved by the library and by the public, most of the photos were donated by the city clerk’s office, said Melissa Potter, the city’s assistant library services director.” The story does not appear to have the URL of the new archive. I tried to leave a comment and I couldn’t. The digital archive itself is at https://burbankinfocus.org/ .
The Monumental Archive Project has officially launched. “The Monumental Archive Project was established to act as an open platform for historic cemeteries research to address issues of accessibility and sustainability, whilst also stimulating creativity and collaboration. It has been a year in the making and is still in the beginning stages. It is being launched with one collection of more than 20 locations in Barbados, with more than 2000 monuments. From here, it is hoped that the collection will grow, and that users will also share their results, their tips, their ideas.”
I don’t have a lot of time to write this one up, but it was so stunning I wanted to share it with you. One of my Google Alert e-mails came with these two alerts right next to each other: Two government officials – one in Kenya, one in India – warning citizens about fraud circulating on social media. I’m sure there’s a lot of this – mostly because I get Google Alerts like this almost every day – but these two resonated. Are we nearing some kind of tipping point for fraudulent imitation of government on social media? How will social media sites address this?
Research: younger audiences now using social media as the primary news source. “Social media is a great place to learn about the news because it’s so easy for journalists to get bottom-line information to the audience quickly. Where it becomes ‘interesting’ — to coin a term — is where social media is the dominant source of information. The majority of a younger audience now gets its news primarily through social media. “
Research: computers learning human languages also learn human biases. “New research from computer scientists at Princeton suggests computers learning human languages will also inevitably learn those human biases. In a draft paper, researchers describe how they used a common language-learning algorithm to infer associations between English words. The results demonstrated biases similar to those found in traditional psychology research and across a variety of topics. In fact, the authors were able to replicate every implicit bias study they tested using the computer model.”
I didn’t even remember Facebook had a coupon product. But apparently it does. “When Facebook introduced Offers in February 2012 for brands to distribute coupons on the social network, it was more or less a me-too product. Now Facebook is trying to make it more of a Facebook product.”
Snapchat wants to make it really easy for you to make your own geofilter. “Ever wanted to create your very own Snapchat filter for a party or wedding, but didn’t know where to start? Instead of paying someone on Fiverr or Etsy to do it for you, Snapchat’s new tool has filter templates you can create in minutes.”
The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive has added a great deal of new content. “The Visual History Archive added 1,302 new testimonies, 1,361 new interviewees, six new experience groups, one new historic event and 10 new collections in a single update over the weekend. The update includes the first 10 Guatemalan Genocide testimonies, 1,179 Holocaust testimonies from the new Canadian Collections, the final 87 Armenian Genocide testimonies and 21 testimonies for the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsis in Rwanda Collection. The Visual History Archive now has 53,973 testimonies.”
Google is shuffling Nest again. “Nest’s entire platform team will become part of Google, which also resides under the Alphabet umbrella, in order to create a unified Internet of things platform. It will be led by longtime Google executive Hiroshi Lockheimer…”
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