Minnesota Court of Appeals, Twitter, Social Profiles, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 23, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Minnesota Judicial Branch: Court of Appeals Special Term Orders Now Available Online. “The Minnesota Court of Appeals, in partnership with the Minnesota State Law Library, is now making available the Court of Appeals’ Special Term Orders in an easily searchable online database on the State Law Library website. The database includes Special Term Orders issued beginning January of this year.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
The Verge: Elon Musk keeps laying off Twitter employees after saying cuts were done. “On November 21st, Elon Musk gathered Twitter’s remaining employees at its San Francisco headquarters to tell them that, after forcing out roughly two-thirds of the workforce in a matter of weeks, layoffs were over. He keeps laying people off anyway.”
USEFUL STUFF
MakeUseOf: 5 Free Solo.to and Linktree Alternatives to Make Link-in-Bio Social Profile Pages. “Several social media sites don’t let you add multiple links in your bio. The best workaround for this is to make a bio-link or link-in-bio page that lets you add links and other details about yourself using simple and free-to-use web apps like these.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Windows Central: Microsoft rolled out its deranged Bing Chat AI in India 4 months ago, and no one noticed. “New evidence shows that Microsoft publicly tested Bing Chat (codenamed ‘Sidney’) in November in India. Moreover, there were already documented complaints about the AI going loopy after long conversations, which became apparent to many after Microsoft’s announcement.”
Washington Post: Russian propagandists said to buy Twitter blue-check verifications. “The accounts claim to be based outside of Russia, so they can pay for verification without running afoul of U.S. sanctions. But they pass along articles from state-run media, statements by Russian officials, and lies about Ukraine from Kremlin allies, according to the research group Reset, which shared its findings with The Washington Post.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Honolulu Civil Beat: The Military’s Public Information Black Hole. “Since I started reporting in Hawaii in 2019, I’ve filed numerous FOIA requests with the military, primarily the Navy. Time and again, I have filed one with the hopes of shining a light on an issue of public importance only to have it fizzle into nothingness. The Freedom of Information Act, which is supposed to provide the transparency needed for a healthy democracy, is too often a pathway to a dead end that leaves us in the dark on critical issues.”
Motherboard: Companies Can’t Ask You to Shut up to Receive Severance, NLRB Rules. “The National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that employers can no longer demand laid-off employees avoid publicly disparaging the company as part of their severance agreements, nor can they stop affected employees from disclosing the terms of their exit packages.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
VentureBeat: New research suggests that privacy in the metaverse might be impossible. “The research analyzed more than 2.5 million VR data recordings (fully anonymized) from more than 50,000 players of the popular Beat Saber app and found that individual users could be uniquely identified with more than 94% accuracy using only 100 seconds of motion data. Even more surprising was that half of all users could be uniquely identified with only 2 seconds of motion data.”
Arizona State University: Do the math: ChatGPT sometimes can’t, expert says. “In a paper that was accepted to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for its spring symposium, [Professor Paulo] Shakarian detailed results of a study in which he tested ChatGPT on 1,000 mathematical word problems.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
Boing Boing: 2Dumb2Destroy is a new AI ChatBot trained on the dumbest dudebros imaginable. “Trained on countless hours of Pauly Shore movies, all seven Police Academies, Ralph Wiggum quotes and that one bodybuiling forum where a bunch of gym bros decided a week had eight days in it, etc. This is one A.I. you don’t have to worry about ever overthrowing humanity, or stealing your job.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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February 24, 2023 at 01:02AM
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Korean Demilitarized Zone, Ireland Folk Music, Pope Pius XII, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, February 23, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Korea JoongAng Daily: Experience Korea’s DMZ virtually in latest Google Arts & Culture project. “The project scale is massive: Divided into three sections — history, art and nature, the ‘DMZ’ project includes 60 online exhibitions and 5,000 historical records and stories related to the war and the zone. Highlights make up a big portion of the history and nature sections. The former essentially tells people’s stories, of the young soldiers who participated in the war and the refugees who fled to Busan, which acted as the provisional capital during the war.”
RTÉ: New archive of traditional song from County Wexford released. “Produced by folklorist Michael Fortune, The County Wexford Traditional Singers Archive features 876 tracks recorded by John O’Byrne and Phil Berry from The County Wexford Traditional Singers, over a period covering January 1991 to February 1996.”
Vatican News: Secretariat of State publishes full “Jews” series of historical archive online. “The Vatican Secretariat of State has completed its virtual reproduction of a collection of 170 volumes preserving the requests for help addressed to Pope Pius XII by Jews from all over Europe after the beginning of Nazi-Fascist persecution.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Fast Company: Twitter’s transparency reporting has tanked under Elon Musk. “Twitter has quietly gone silent about how it enforces its rules and responds to government demands about its users. The company has not posted a transparency report since Elon Musk’s purchase of it in October, ending a 10-year streak of keeping the world apprised of governmental user information requests.”
How-To Geek: Contacts Are Getting Better in Gmail. “The Google Contacts sidebar in Gmail, which you can find to the right of your window alongside apps like Google Tasks and Google Keep, currently lets you see contacts. A new change is rolling out that will let you add new contacts and edit existing ones.”
TechCrunch: Twitter will send a notification when a tweet you replied to or retweeted gets a Community Note . “Blindingly amplifying views or posts on social media is one of the key reasons for the rapid spread of misinformation. Over the years, prominent figures have posted or retweeted false information on Twitter. The social network is now giving a chance to withdraw a retweet for such instances through a new Community Notes — its crowdsourced fact-checking program — feature.”
USEFUL STUFF
Lifehacker: The Best Authenticator Apps for iPhone and Android. “2FA fills in the security gaps—but not all 2FA is created equal. For most people, authenticator apps offer the best mix of convenience and security. But which one is best for you?”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
WIRED: Meet the Superusers Behind IMDb, the Internet’s Favorite Movie Site. “In an era when many have become pessimistic about the state of the internet, Wikipedia is often held up as a rare miracle of collaborative, crowdsourced knowledge-gathering for the public good—a lonely holdout for the early web’s utopian ideals. But IMDb has been doing much the same for five years longer than Wikipedia.”
Middlebury Institute of International Studies: Middlebury Institute Launches New “Subtitling for Streaming” Online Course with More Courses to Come. “Online video production is skyrocketing and it’s driving demand for people who are trained to create high-quality subtitles. That’s why the Middlebury Institute of International Studies has launched a new self-paced, short course titled Subtitling for Streaming.” Good morning, Internet…
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February 23, 2023 at 06:32PM
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Cosmetic Ingredients Europe, New Hampshire Municipal Government, McLaren Racing, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 22, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Premium Beauty News: Cosmetics Europe launches database of cosmetic ingredients. “… the database provides information on almost 30,000 ingredients used in cosmetics. It includes information on ingredient properties, their function, whether they are man-made and/or of natural origin and in which types of products they can be found.”
University of New Hampshire: UNH Library Digitizes Town Reports for Entire Granite State. “The UNH Library recently wrapped up a massive multi-year project that digitized and organized all known annual reports for every town in New Hampshire, an undertaking that essentially reached every municipality, past and present, throughout the state. The New Hampshire City and Town Annual Reports Collection now boasts 35,491 volumes, including more than 20,000 added during the most recent blitz that began in 2021 thanks in part to a grant from the New Hampshire State Library.”
Google Blog: Check out Street View’s new collection with McLaren Racing. “Since Google became an official partner of the Formula 1 team last year, we’ve worked to create an exclusive Street View experience that takes fans behind the scenes at the McLaren Technology Center (MTC), the headquarters of McLaren Racing and home of the McLaren Formula 1 Team in Surrey, England.”
USEFUL STUFF
Online Journalism Blog: VIDEO PLAYLIST: An introduction to Python for data journalism and scraping. “Python is an extremely powerful language for journalists who want to scrape information from online sources. This series of videos, made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University, explains some core concepts to get started in Python, how to use Colab notebooks within Google Drive, and introduces some code to get started with scraping.”
MakeUseOf: How to Create a Direct Link for Your Google Drive Files. “Are you looking for ways to share files from Google Drive conveniently? Look no further. When you’re working with files, nobody wants to be redirected to a page where they still have to click the download option. Luckily, you can create a direct download link to share your files. That way, your recipients can download files from you by simply clicking a link. Here, you’ll learn how to create a direct download link for your Google Drive files.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Press Trust of India: Company Employees With Fake Profiles Created False Praise About Gautam Adani, Says Wikipedia. “For more than a decade, sockpuppets – some of them being company employees – created ‘puffery’ around tycoon Gautam Adani, his family and the apples-to-airport group he helmed by adding non-neutral material and removing warnings from information on Wikipedia, the free internet-based encyclopedia has alleged.”
Ars Technica: Viral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated. “With over 26,000 followers, Jos Avery’s Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo portraits of people, they are not actually people at all. Avery has been posting AI-generated portraits for the past few months, and as more fans praise his apparently masterful photography skills, he has grown nervous about telling the truth.”
Bleeping Computer: Activision confirms data breach exposing employee and game info. “Activision has confirmed that it suffered a data breach in early December 2022 after hackers gained access to the company’s internal systems by tricking an employee with an SMS phishing text. The video game maker says that the incident has not compromised game source code or player details.”
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February 23, 2023 at 01:24AM
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Global News (Canada): New wrongful convictions database spurs hope of reforms, change in Canada. “Students and staff at the University of Toronto law school are launching a new database this week documenting dozens of cases of wrongful convictions in Canada hoping to draw more attention to the problem.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Search Engine Journal: TikTok’s Latest Monetization Tool: Creativity Program Beta. “TikTok has introduced a new program called the Creativity Program Beta, designed to help creators earn more money with longer content. The program is the latest addition to TikTok’s range of monetization tools that support creators of all levels.”
USEFUL STUFF
WIRED: How to Protect Yourself from Twitter’s 2FA Crackdown. “On February 17, Twitter announced plans to stop people using SMS-based two-factor authentication to secure their accounts—unless they start paying for a Twitter Blue subscription. However, there are more secure, free, and easier ways to continue protecting your Twitter account with two-factor authentication.”
MakeUseOf: Make Old Low-Resolution Images Look Great on Linux With Upscayl. “Fortunately, the same kind of machine learning and image enhancement carried out by high-end phones, can be carried out on your Linux PC. Upscayl takes any JPG, PNG, or WEBP image as input, and allows you to select from a variety of upscaling options. The resulting images are suitable for use as glorious desktop backgrounds, and you can even batch-process multiple image files, bringing entire photo albums up to date, and looking good.” This is a bit more technical than most of the articles I include, but I know a lot of genealogists read ResearchBuzz and this looks like a powerful tool.
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Washington Post: AI is starting to pick who gets laid off. “Google says there was ‘no algorithm involved’ in their job cut decisions. But former employees are not wrong to wonder, as a fleet of artificial intelligence tools become ingrained in office life. Human resources managers use machine learning software to analyze millions of employment related data points, churning out recommendations of who to interview, hire, promote or help retain.”
Deadline: BBC Takes Down Story About Will Ferrell After Being Fooled By Fake Twitter Account. “The BBC has taken down from its website a story about Will Ferrell after being fooled by a Twitter account that did not belong to the Anchorman actor. Ferrell has been in the UK this month on something of a soccer tour, attending a variety of games and mingling with fans.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Independent (Ireland): ‘Inaccessible’ RTÉ Archives to be made more open to the public under proposed legislation. “RTÉ Archives could be made more open to the public under proposed new laws. The current archive is ‘inaccessible and prohibitive’ according to Green TD Patrick Costello…. However, the operation of the archives may be revamped if the Government decide to support Mr Costello’s bill and open it up to the public.”
AFP: France says tax on tech giants ‘blocked’ in global talks. “International talks aimed at taxing global tech giants that only declare profits in a few jurisdictions have hit a standstill due to opposition from countries including the US and India, France’s finance minister said Monday.”
Mother Jones: Bing Is a Liar—and It’s Ready to Call the Cops. “When I started playing with Bing, I was drawn by its promise of relevant, accurate, and natural-sounding web results. I was confronted instead by the possibility of industrial-scale fabrication.”
PsyPost: Psychologists uncover “frightening” results after examining susceptibility to fake news in Hungary. “People with greater cognitive reflectiveness tend to be better at distinguishing disinformation from real information, according to new research. However, in Hungary, voters who oppose the government used their thinking skills to question false information that was both concordant and discordant with their political views, while voters who support the government were far less likely to question fake news.” Good morning, Internet…
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February 22, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Private Jet Carbon Emissions, 19th Century Black Poets, Microsoft Outlook, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Business Insider: A 17-year-old Seattle high schooler is tracking more than 150 private jets’ emissions. “Using [Jack] Sweeney’s Ground Control Registration Database — which was developed to famously track Elon Musk’s private jet — [Akash] Shendure identifies and compiles carbon emissions from the private jets of more than 150 wealthy Americans and their families.”
Cornell Chronicle: Website sheds light on 19th century Black literary culture. “The site includes 700 poems [Charline] Jao discovered and transcribed from periodicals managed by Black editors in New York City. The site is searchable by publication, title, description, author and other parameters. The website also includes collections of poems focused on themes — from deaths and elegies to hymns and songs to British poets and women poets. Another section showcases a large collection of online and textual resources.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Bleeping Computer: Microsoft Outlook flooded with spam due to broken email filters. “According to reports from an increasing number of Microsoft customers, Outlook inboxes have been flooded with spam emails over the last nine hours because email spam filters are currently broken. This ongoing issue was confirmed by countless Outlook users who have reported (on social media platforms and the Microsoft Community’s website) that all messages were landing in their inboxes, even those that would have been previously tagged as spam and sent to the junk folder.”
Euroradio: Russian propaganda creates network of mirror sites to bypass blockades in Europe. “After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it was decided to block the projects in the EU. The authorities restricted access to sites with disinformation, and later made it impossible for legal entities associated with the projects to operate. But the propaganda resources are still working and getting their audience in Europe. Here’s how they do it.”
Yle: Finnish grammar foils pro-Russia trolls. “Attempts by trolls to write the sentence ‘Nato cannot save Finland’ in Finnish failed because the language has two different words for ‘save’, with two completely different meanings.”
University of Delaware: Mellon Foundation grant supports UD Library project focused on 20th-century poet-activists of color. “The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press was recently awarded a $250,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the curation and stewardship of poetry archives related to 20th-century poet-activists of color along with a digital publishing and poet-in-residence project that draws on these collections.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Motherboard: Librarians Are Finding Thousands Of Books No Longer Protected By Copyright Law. “The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.”
University of Michigan: U-M researchers aim to bring humans back into the loop, as AI use and misuse rises. “A trans-Atlantic team of researchers, including two from the University of Michigan, has reviewed information systems research on what’s known as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and found an overwhelming focus on technology-enabled business benefits. The focus means far less attention is being paid to societal implications—what the researchers refer to as “the increasing risk and damage to humans.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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February 22, 2023 at 01:33AM
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1930s British Cinema-Going, Tile Trackers, AI-Powered Seinfeld, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, February 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Lancaster University: Focus on silver screen stars and cinema-going now open to all. “The Lancaster team worked with experts from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Glasgow to produce the ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond’ (CMDA)… The starting point for the project focused on materials gathered during the course of ‘Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain’ (CCINTB), a large-scale pioneering nationwide inquiry, conducted in the 1990s, into cinema audiences and film going in the 1930s.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
TechCrunch: Tile takes extreme steps to limit stalkers and thieves from using its Bluetooth trackers. “Apple took a big PR hit as news spread that its item tracker the AirTag was being used for stalking and car thefts, which led the company to retool its software with a closer eye on user safety. AirTag’s competitor Tile is now introducing its own plan to make its device safer, with the launch of a new feature called ‘anti-theft mode,’ which prevents the tracker from being detected by anyone but its owner. But it’s taking things a bit further…”
Irish Examiner: Limerick historian ‘blown away’ by discovery of documents. “‘Utterly breathtaking’ historical documents dating as far back as 1695 may have been lost forever if not for a man who rescued the collection 30 years ago from a skip.”
Washington Post: TikTok loves Gen Z’s true confessions. Colleges and employers, not so much.. “While corporate social media campaigns ‘raised awareness’ around subjects like mental health and body positivity, young people shared their experiences in droves. But as they hit college or the working world, they’re met with a harsh reality: The standard of professionalism among older generations hasn’t changed, and it doesn’t make room for the type of authenticity social media companies tend to encourage.”
InsideHook: Google Maps Incorrectly Directed Drivers to a Residential Driveway. “The next time I’m passing through [Warren, New Jersey], however, I’m going to be a little more aware of where my navigation of choice — in this case, Google Maps — is taking me. Why? Well, because a few Warren residents recently learned that Google Maps believes that their driveways are through streets, and is directing drivers accordingly.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Search Engine Journal: WordPress Vulnerability: ShortPixel Enable Media Replace Plugin. “National Vulnerability Database published a vulnerability advisory about the ShortPixel Enable Media Replace WordPress plugin used by over 600,000 websites. A high severity vulnerability was discovered that could allow an attacker to upload arbitrary files. The United States Vulnerability Database (NVD) assigned the vulnerability a score of 8.8 out of 10, with 10 being the highest severity.”
BBC: Why TikTok sleuths descended on Nicola Bulley’s village. “I am walking the same route that Nicola Bulley, 45, followed before she disappeared, along the river in the small Lancashire village of Saint Michael’s on Wyre. It’s also the same route that amateur social media sleuths take when they come to look into the case themselves. They have been turning up in their numbers, prompted by rumours, speculation and conspiracy on social media viewed and shared by millions of people who have never been anywhere near this village.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
The Conversation: How Records of Life’s Milestones Help Solve Cold Cases, Pinpoint Health Risks and Allocate Public Resources. “As a family demographer, I use information from these vital records to understand how childbirth, marriage and divorce are changing in the United States over time. The scope and quality of these records reflect remarkable administrative coordination from the local to the national level, but examples from other countries illustrate how much more the records could yet tell us.”
Penn State: Beyond memorization: Text generators may plagiarize beyond ‘copy and paste’. “Students may want to think twice before using a chatbot to complete their next assignment. Language models that generate text in response to user prompts plagiarize content in more ways than one, according to a Penn State-led research team that conducted the first study to directly examine the phenomenon.”
Stanford Daily: Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege. “[Marc] Tessier-Lavigne, who became Stanford’s president in 2016, has been under investigation by the Stanford Board of Trustees since late November, after The Daily revealed concerns that several other papers he had co-authored contained altered imagery. But these latest allegations, about a different paper, are more serious because they involve what was once considered a promising treatment target for Alzheimer’s disease — and because people involved in the review allege that Tessier-Lavigne tried to keep its findings hidden.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
Chron: How a vast collection of Mardi Gras history was lost, then found. “… they couldn’t believe their eyes: hand-painted scenes—some 40 feet high—of mountain ranges, ancient cities, exotic castles and whimsical fantasy landscapes, in still-vivid color, with mica accents glittering across waves and windowpanes. They noticed words scribbled on the back of some: Athenians 1929, Osiris 1940, Hermes, and many more. To an outsider these might be cryptic, mystical words, but a New Orleanian instantly recognizes them as the names of Mardi Gras krewes.” Good morning, Internet…
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February 21, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part III: Popularity/Interest)
By ResearchBuzz
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching.
In Part II, I looked at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces and do Web search. That approach uses authoritative spaces (like restricted top-level domains) and authoritative expertise (like the US Department of Education) to create Web spaces that are useful and as low on misinformation/disinformation as possible.
In Part III, we’re going to look at a less formal method for focusing and enhancing your searches: popularity and interest. And please, before you run away screaming at the word popularity, give me a few paragraphs. Popularity can be useful in Web search!
What Popularity Isn’t
If you think about popularity you might think about the cool kids in high school, or the movies and TV shows you hear about in the media even though you have no interest in them personally.
When I first started thinking about popularity, cultural popularity was the kind I thought of – the national-level advertising and marketing and media Brownian motion that fills up style sections and YouTube channels. Could be great for searching current events and cultural topics, but for regular Web search? Not so much.
But when I stopped taking such a wide view and started looking at popularity on a more topical basis, I realized I wasn’t seeing it as holistically as I should. National-level popularity is an amalgam of media attention and marketing budgets. Topic-level popularity has some elements of national popularity, but it’s got additional elements as well.
What Popularity Is
Imagine you’re an American who doesn’t know much about music. If I asked you “who’s a good rock guitarist?,” you might say Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen because they are very popular and well-known in our culture. If I asked you “Who’s a good country guitarist?” you might come up blank, or, depending on where you live, you might mention Buck Owens or Chet Atkins. And if I asked you “Who’s a good flamenco guitarist?” you might wonder what my problem is.
Popularity at a national/cultural level feels pervasive enough that you might think it encompasses all things and that all popularity is noise. But of course it isn’t; as soon as you pull back to a more localized- or topic- based perspective, you realize the richness of the things around us.
Popularity is the Sustained Interest of a Knowledgeable Group
A thing is popular because at least one group of people took a sustained interest in it and gave it their attention. Sometimes that group is a marketing group, sometimes that group is an expert group, and sometimes that group is a fandom. Sometimes it’s all of the above!
(And please note that a thing’s popularity has nothing to do with its inherent goodness or value. It’s just popularity. Something isn’t better because it’s popular or worse because it’s unknown.)
A marketing group’s motive for popularity is not something useful to Web search, so let’s skip that kind. Instead, let’s look at expert groups and fandom groups. When they make something popular by giving it attention, what do they have concerning that topic that you do not? Expertise and experience.
Expertise
If an expert group recommends something within its realm of expertise, it’s because they have knowledge of it and in their assessment it’s something worth paying attention to. (If instead they’re recommending something because they’re paid to, we’re back to the attention of a marketing group.)
Consumer Reports is a good example of this. CR has an excellent reputation for testing products and providing recommendations without editorial bias. That’s valuable because you know their recommendations are based on knowledge, not hearsay, and provided without bias.
Hobbyists can be a useful mix of expert and fan, and there are hobbyist groups for everything. There are people who bond over extreme ironing. I bet they know a lot about ironing boards and outdoor sports that I don’t. Some people collect airsickness bags. I bet they’ve forgotten the names of more airlines than I ever knew. And, of course, if you ask a guitarist who their favorite guitarists are, you’ll probably hear names you never heard before.
Experience
You can learn a lot about something just by paying attention for a long time. If you do it for long enough, you can start developing an understanding of the thing and how it works in relation to other topics.
Sports fans, you already know about this. If you’ve ever expressed the opinion online that the Sippergulch So-and-Sos had a great lineup in 2012, you know you run the risk of someone pushing back with an essay about how the Sippergulch So-and-Sos of 1986 were clearly the superior team, with extensive comments about front office politics and tons of supporting evidence. It’s not a formal aggregation of knowledge but it does inform expertise! And again, it’s knowledge you don’t have if you’re not part of a group interested in the topic.
Well, all this sounds great, doesn’t it? Find out what enthusiasts are interested in and use that to make a better Web search. But how do you know what those people are looking at and looking up? You’d have to have some kind of large reference resource that covered every conceivable topic, divided them into categories, and encouraged people worldwide to contribute their own knowledge. And on top of that, this resource would have to make its pageview counts public so you could assess the popularity of each page.
Oh wait, we do have that: it’s called Wikipedia!
Wikipedia’s Secret Weapon: Pageviews
Wikimedia has a Pageviews API which allows you to get page view information for Wikipedia and other projects. It’s not extensive – the archives go back only to late 2015. But it can still be really useful.
There are some cool tools that let you graph and compare page count views across Wikipedia pages using the Pageviews API, but I’m using that page popularity information a little differently. Instead of comparing pages to each other one at a time, I made a Search Gizmo to find the most popular pages within categories, and another one to use popular pages in Wikipedia categories to make better Google searches.
Let’s look at how using popularity can make your searches easier.
Using Popularity for Topical Search: Category Cheat Sheet
Let’s go back to pretending that you’re an American with little music knowledge. But after you listened to my weird questions about guitarists and flamenco guitar, you find yourself interested in flamenco and you want to listen to music and learn about flamenco guitarists.. After some Web surfing you find yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_flamenco_guitarists . It looks like this:
There are over 50 guitarists on this page. They’re listed in alphabetical order. How do you decide where to start? Do you click at random? Do you grimly start reviewing the pages in order? Or do you wish you knew someone who was into flamenco music so you could ask about Spanish guitar players?
You might not know any Spanish flamenco enthusiasts, but Wikipedia does, in a roundabout way; you can use the pageviews API to find out which of the people in this category get the most interest. Sorting the pages in a category by that interest gives you a more meaningful list and a place to start.
Category Cheat Sheet, at https://searchgizmos.com/ccs/ , will reorganize the pages in a Wikipedia category by popularity and give you brief summaries of the top 20 pages. Here’s how the Spanish flamenco guitarists category looks with it:
In addition to getting a brief description of the page topic/person and a link to the full article, you also get a count of the most recent month’s page views. That lets you tell at a glance if most of the musicians are equally popular or if the category has any superstars.
In this case Paco de Lucía is clearly the leader in the category in terms of popularity, with a pageview count almost ten times that of Pepe Romero. You might decide to start a search with his name and the terms Spanish flamenco guitar, or maybe you’ll review his full Wikipedia article and look for search terms that you can add to a Google search.
In either case you are now more informed. You know who the larger names are in this space. You know who’s probably going to have more news and multimedia resources. You even, thanks to the summaries, have an idea of which figures in a category are contemporary or historical.
Category Cheat Sheet works well for topics in addition to people. Say you’re interested in renewable energy. You know about solar and wind power, and maybe you’ve heard about hydropower. But you don’t know much beyond that. Plugging in Category:Renewable_energy shows you a list of technologies, companies, and even places relevant to renewable energy.
I call this kind of exploration surface-scratching; by sorting Wikipedia pages by popularity I can get beyond popular culture and its misconceptions and get a broader idea of what’s happening in a topic. Once I do that, and I know a little more, I can build better searches.
You can also use the popularity of Wikipedia pages to build topical searches on Google. That’s what Clumpy Bounce is all about.
Using Popularity to Inform General Web Search: Clumpy Bounce Topic Search
Clumpy Bounce, at https://searchgizmos.com/clumpy/ , lets you clump up to three Wikipedia pages into a query and then bounce them into a Google search. First you start by finding categories covering your topic of interest:
Then you choose up to three of the most popular pages in that category:
And finally, you click the button and get a Google search for those three topics (along with a little query-tinkering to eliminate as much Wikipedia-based content as possible.)
The thing I really love about Clumpy Bounce is you can quickly try lots of different searches around a single topic. Changing just one element in your Google search leads to very different results.
Clumpy Bounce is basically just a big surface-scratcher. It lets you expand your topical searches with keywords you may not immediately know but can understand in terms of popularity. And having all those keywords available allows you to attack your search in several different ways, as you can see from the results above. You get a lot of directions to choose from.
Earlier in the article I defined popularity as “the sustained interest of a knowledgeable group.” But what about when people are popular because they’re on the news, or they had a hit record, or they went viral on TikTok? That’s unsustained interest which sometimes turns into sustained interest but often doesn’t.
But even that kind of interest is useful too, because it helps you find times when something might be particularly newsworthy, even when it’s normally ubiquitous. Let’s talk about Gossip Machine.
Using Temporary Popularity to Gauge Historical Interest: Gossip Machine
You’re chatting with someone at work. They mention a news topic you haven’t heard about. Later you Google it and find that the first result is a Wikipedia page, so you click on that and enlighten yourself. Or you hear on the news that someone has died. Did you see them in that one sitcom, or was it a game show? You Google it, get Wikipedia as the first result, and click on it to refresh your memory.
Now multiply that same behavior by millions of people a day and you can immediately see how Wikipedia’s Pageviews API is a huge goldmine for what I like calling fossilized attention – discrete points in the life of a Wikipedia topic when it is particularly searchable for whatever reason. And since the reason for sudden popularity is often some kind of news consumption, why not reverse-engineer this fossilized attention and turn it into a date-focused Google News search?
That’s what Gossip Machine ( https://searchgizmos.com/gossip-machine/ ) does! It tallies Wikipedia article views over the course of a year and creates date-based Google News searches for those days which have an unusually high number of views. It works spectacularly well for people who are/were in the news constantly, helping filter out meaningful news from mentions.
Take for example Tucker Carlson. He has a news show that’s on every night so has a lot of media mentions and attention to start with. But you can filter that with Gossip Machine. You can do a keyword search for his name, select the year (Gossip Machine goes back to 2016), and choose how high the spike in page views should be before it’s noted.
Gossip Machine will present you with a list of Google News and Google Web searches, one for each date that Gossip Machine finds.
Click on a search link and it’ll open in a new tab. It’s not a perfect search and gets wonky when average page views are low, but for pages with at least 7000 views a month it can bring some very targeted news results.
And just like the Category Cheat Sheet, it works for topical searches too. A good example search is psilocybin, which has gotten a surge of news coverage in the last year.
There are only a few results but they’re great searches:
Temporary and Ongoing Popularity Are Both Powerful Search Tools
You’re not making a value judgment when you search for the most popular elements in a Wikipedia category, you’re using the interest and expertise of others to guide your Web search to what are hopefully information-rich resources. No doubt as your expertise and understanding of a topic deepens, you will find your own favorites off the beaten path!
I’ve covered a lot of philosophical ground in these first three parts of this series, but I want to do one more article looking at how you can use the ideas covered in the first three parts in conjunction with each other. Stay tuned.
February 21, 2023 at 03:55AM
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