Search Engine Journal: Social Media Engagement Rates Dropping Across Top Networks. “Discover median engagement rates for 14 industries on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter in the 2023 Social Media Benchmarks Report.”
ProPublica: How to Track Your Tax Refund in 2023. “You’ve figured out your deductions or credits, calculated how much you owed in taxes and successfully filed your return. If you’re sitting around wondering where your money is, you’re not alone. Lucky for you, the IRS offers several ways to track your tax return.”
Google Blog: Let’s go. It’s Google I/O 2023. “Google I/O is back and you’re invited to join us online May 10! Learn about Google’s latest solutions, products, and technologies for developers, that help unlock your creativity and simplify your development workflow.”
Techdirt; Announcing The Winners Of The 5th Annual Public Domain Game Jam!. “In January, we asked designers to create games based on works that entered the public domain this year for our fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! It took us a little while to get through all the entries, but now it’s time to announce the winners, and it was not an easy decision.”
CBS News: “Petfluencer” and “rage farming” among new words added to Dictionary.com. “The update, published on Feb. 28, includes 313 new words. Many words address modern situations. For example, ‘rage farming’ is the tactic of using inflammatory content to garner a response on social media and ‘pinkwashing’ refers to the way corporations superficially acknowledge and support LGBTQ+ rights while also supporting anti-LGBTQ causes.”
Mashable: Why have some people stopped using BeReal?. “At its peak in September 2022, BeReal saw 12 million monthly downloads. This January, that fell to 3.3 million, according to data from Business of Apps and Apptopia. More indicatively, perhaps, is the drop in daily active users: this number has nearly halved, from 20 million daily users in October 2022 to 10.4 million now.”
Search Engine Land: Google Search remains the go-to news discovery platform. “Google Search remains the top platforms for U.S. adults to research major news events but Gen Z seems to be more inclined to head to TikTok than other generations, according to a new survey.”
Tubefilter: An annual study of kids’ habits found that they average 107 minutes per day on TikTok. “If the U.S. government follows through on its proposal to ban TikTok, it will have a lot of angry teens on its hands. A recent survey published by parental control service Qustodio suggests that young consumers are spending more time on TikTok than ever before. According to the report, the average TikTok user between the ages of 4 and 18 spent 107 minutes per day on the app in 2022.”
How-To Geek: The 6 Best Note Taking Apps of 2023. “There’s nothing worse than jotting down a note and leaving it behind or losing it in a stack of paper. With note taking software, you can take your notes wherever you go or access them from any computer. Find the one for you with these best note taking apps.”
Library of Congress: What’s new online at the Library of Congress – January 2023. “The Signal shares semi-regular updates of new additions to publicly available digital collections and we love showing off all the hard work of our colleagues from across the Library. Read on for a sample of what’s been added recently and some of our favorite highlights. Click here for previous updates.”
Michigan Daily: Nichetok/Corecore: TikTok’s trendy nihilistic echo chamber. “Calling someone ‘scenecore’ is the same as saying ‘you look scene’ in an adapted, chronically online way. There exist dozens of these -core terms, creating an almost absurd amount of micro-niche aesthetics and tastes. So now that we understand the -core suffix, what does ‘corecore’ mean? What does it look like? The answer is rather simple: Its purpose seems to be against this hyper-specific trend culture. It doesn’t fit any defined look or aesthetic, it just exists to compile feelings.”
Lifehacker: You Can Attend Sundance Without Going to Utah. “The 2023 Sundance Film Festival returns to Park City, Utah this week, but you don’t have to travel to enjoy a packed schedule of movie screenings. After several years of partly virtual (or virtual-only) programming, it seems like online showings are here to stay.”
CNN: LinkedIn is having a moment thanks to a wave of layoffs. “In a normal year at this time, a typical LinkedIn feed might be full of posts about year-end reflections on leadership and professional goals and suggested lifehacks for the year ahead — possibly with a few posts from CMOs offering tips on brand strategy, for good measure. Those posts are still there. But mixed in are many others about job hunts, offers of support for laid off friends and colleagues, and advice for coping with career hurdles in an uncertain economic environment.”
The Register: CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit. “As the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show winds down, it’s once again time for the Worst in Show Awards, an enumeration of ill-conceived tech products as determined by various technology advocates.”
Engadget: The best of CES 2023. “After canceling our CES plans in 2022 (and not even having the option of attending in person in 2021), the Engadget team sent a dozen staffers to CES 2023 this week, including reporters, editors and videographers. It’s too soon to say how many stories and videos we’ve published — in fact, we have more good stuff coming — but suffice to say, it was a lot. Though our team swears the show still wasn’t as busy as pre-pandemic years, they were kept busy enough that it felt like a true return to form, not just for us, but for the tech industry at large.”
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