Fast Company highlighted an interesting presentation from the recent SXSW conference. While its scale is smaller than, for instance, Facebook, Twitter’s influence on the media business is substantial. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti showed that Twitter has a big cascade effect on other social media platforms. Big, viral stories often start as […]
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently announced that his office would be introducing an application-programming interface (API) that will allow application developers to access and use data from its NYOpenGovernment.com database. NYOpenGovernment.com is an effort by the AG’s office to promote the public’s right to know and monitor governmental decision-making. It aggregates […]
According to a new survey, Facebook, while still the dominant social media, is the only one that saw a decline in active user numbers between 2013 and 2014. Meanwhile, Twitter and Google+ held steady, while the rest, i.e., Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Badoo, rose. Facebook’s definition of an active user is very broad […]
Reuters recently announced a partnership with ITN Source to make historical archive footage far more accessible. The Reuters video archive is making hundreds of thousands of rare and largely unseen news clips digitally available for preview and licensing on itnsource.com. To date, over 115,000 Reuters clips have been digitised and published, expanding the […]
MIT Technology Review recently reported on a new app called Sunshine that uses crowdsourcing to create more accurate, localized weather forecasts. The app, currently in a private beta test, combines data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with atmospheric pressure readings captured by a smartphone. The latest iPhones, and some Android […]
Mashable recently noted that Google launched a new storage platform for “cold data”, i.e., infrequently used and accessed information. Cold data is often kept for legal or regulatory reasons, so the service is designed with these businesses in mind. The new platform, called Google Cloud Storage Nearline, costs just $0.01 per GB at rest […]
Ars Technica posted an interesting article about the development of language. Language has been studied extensively, but recently a group of researchers constructed and performed a study to test how languages change in different environments. The aim of the study was to test how the language-using population size affects the rate of […]
The New York Times recently wrote about the fascination of some young Internet users with animations and other features of social sites of the 1990’s. Labeling it “Netstalgia,” the article points out the example of the Animated Text blog and interviews its creator Cat Frazier, a 23-year-old developer (who, presumably, did not use […]
Today being St. Patrick’s Day, we highlight a new digital archive containing hundreds of examples of important artistic works produced during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Compiled by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the database includes close to 500 examples of work by over 100 artists relating to the Troubles between 1969 […]
io9 recently published an article about some skills that are dying out or on the verge of extinction. As technology and times change, some skills are no longer as useful. As a result, some once basic and fundamental fade. The writers posed the question as to what skills will or already are diminishing. Among […]
