ZDNet: How to bookmark a Mastodon post (and why you should). “What is this feature? It’s very much like the bookmarks you use on your web browser — a convenient method of saving a post so you can easily refer to it later. You may not have used the bookmark feature on Twitter, but Mastodon is different. ”
Online Journalism Blog: Making video and audio interviews searchable: how Pinpoint helped with one investigation. “MA Data Journalism student Tony Jarne spent eight months investigating exempt accommodation, collecting hundreds of documents, audio and video recordings along the way. To manage all this information, he turned to Google’s free tool Pinpoint. In a special guest post for OJB, he explains how it should be an essential part of any journalist’s toolkit.”
Make Tech Easier: How to Download Reddit Videos. “Reddit now lets you download videos directly from the app. If you find this feature is not working for you, there are some workarounds you can take advantage of. This tutorial shows you how to download Reddit videos on your Android phone or PC.”
Gizmodo: The Best Ways To Find and Organize Your Phone’s Forgotten Photos. “Many of us are now carrying around so many digital images that they can easily get forgotten and ignored, gathering dust or whatever the virtual equivalent is as we move on to new adventures and new photos—after all, when is the last time you actually took a moment to browse back through your media library? This is a problem that the best photo apps know about, and there are ways to resurface classic images and videos from the past, without having to spend hours scrolling through brightly colored thumbnails.”
Screen Rant: How To Follow Hashtags On Mastodon (And Why It Isn’t Working). “Following hashtags can create a personalized feed of content for users to enjoy, but what is the best way to follow hashtags on the Mastodon app? Without hashtags, users potentially lose out on content that could be relevant to their interests. While it is easy to search for hashtags, users just want an easy way to see relevant content without searching for it.”
PetaPixel: The Personal Photo Curator: A New Profession is Born. “The average family may shoot four thousand photos in a year. If you have been taking pictures since the iPhone 3G came out in 2008, it means that now, after 14 years of a trigger-happy existence, you are inundated with over 50,000 photos. And you probably cannot find a perfect shot from a vacation you took just three years ago. Enter personal photo curator Isabelle Dervaux, who can make sense of your photo mess and get your collection organized and, more importantly, functional.”
Bellingcat: Identifying Suspicious Businesses, Reddit Analysis and Tracking Russian Propaganda: Here are the Results of Bellingcat’s First Ever Hackathon. “Bellingcat hosted its first ever hackathon earlier this month with the event focussing on developing network analysis tools. We were impressed with the quality of the projects and had a great time getting to know the developers, many of whom work at the intersection between open-source research and open-source software.”
Bellingcat: Preserve Vital Online Content With Bellingcat’s Auto Archiver. “Open source research often relies on social media posts that contain videos and images. However, these posts can be taken down by platforms or deleted by those posting them. That’s why we at Bellingcat created a tool — the Auto Archiver — to help the open-source community, as well as journalists and researchers, easily archive online content. The tool allows for posts, and their video or visual attachments, to be archived by simply entering a link into a Google Sheets document.”
Fast Company: The secretly powerful little app that you could write an entire book in. “I started writing a novel one evening a week when my oldest child was a baby. I’ve just completed a big rewrite and finally feel ready to take the next steps toward getting my story out into the world….. My lifeline: Google Keep, a simple note-taking app. For anyone else writing a book in the few minutes scattered throughout your day, here’s how I did it—and how you can, too.”
Financial Times: TikTok resists calls to preserve Ukraine content for war crime investigations . “TikTok is resisting calls to preserve and hand over access to its content for war crime investigations, as lawyers and activists warn that the Chinese-owned app is a major data challenge in prosecuting atrocities in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
MakeUseOf: 6 Ways to Save Twitter Bookmarks for Free and Find Favorite Tweets Later. “Twitter currently lets you bookmark tweets in a tedious method. And then, to organize them in folders, you need the Twitter Blue premium subscription service. It’s ridiculous that you have to pay for such a basic feature, which is why we are not impressed with Twitter Blue. It seems like several developers also thought there should be a better way than this and launched several apps that give you a free version of Twitter Bookmarks.”
Hongkiat: 10 Best Web Highlighters for Desktop in 2022. “Have you used any web highlighters? It helps us improve our productivity by copying and pasting important texts you’ve found online automatically, saving good articles in your directory, and highlighting important sentences on articles so that you can remember them when looking back. In this article, I’ll introduce you to 10 useful web highlighters for the desktop.”
Bellingcat: This New Tool Lets You Analyse TikTok Hashtags. “Compared to those of other social media platforms, TikTok’s API (Application Programming Interface) presents more obstacles to developers. It can change frequently, making it harder for developers to use and harder for researchers to draw wider insights from trends as they develop over weeks and months. Bellingcat’s Investigative Tech Team has therefore created the Bellingcat TikTok Analysis Tool (built on the basis of a TikTok scraper offered by Github user drawrowfly) that allows researchers to collect a dataset of TikToks associated with specific hashtags over lengthier periods.”
MakeUseOf: How to Create and Manage TikTok Collections. “While most people are familiar with how to like and share videos on TikTok, did you know you can also organize saved videos in collections on the app? Here’s what you need to know about how to save TikTok videos in collections.”
Make Tech Easier: How to Copy and Paste on Sites that Won’t Let You . Don’t use this for evil. “While surfing the Web, have you ever found a handy piece of information you want to add to the presentation you’re working on but can’t right-click to copy the text because the website has disabled it? Luckily, there are a few easy workarounds that let you copy and paste from any website you want.”
