6 13 - 26 November 2019
T
he popular GIF
search engine Giphy
has launched a new
platform called Arcade,
which lets you play and
share micro-games
featuring retro-style
graphics and stickers.
Many of the games are
clones of classics, such as
Breakout and Asteroids- you simply visit the
website on your PC or
mobile device, choose a
title and drag or press on
the screen to move the main
characters. Each game takes mere
seconds to play and is accompanied
by music and sound effects that
could have come straight from
the 1980s.
What makes the service most
intriguing, however, is the ability to
remix the games and create titles
from scratch by selecting one of 10
web.archive.org/save
Users of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine manually
submit millions of web pages for archiving every day. This
freezes a page in time and makes it available for subsequent
viewing via the archive – an invaluable service for anyone
looking for an earlier version of a website.
The archiving process has
now been made easier –
when you visit the Save Page
Now section and enter a URL,
just click Save Outlinks to
capture the page and all
linked pages and embedded
resources, including the
HTML, JavaScript and
images, along with a
screenshot of the archived pages.
Pages being archived for the
first time are now flagged up and
you can also archive pages via
email, by sending them to
[email protected]. The
Wayback Machine is keen to encourage more archiving by
introducing leaderboards for a more competitive edge.
bit.ly/stories
A picture paints a
thousand words and it
seems Google Arts &
Culture is taking this
literally. To celebrate
the 15th anniversary
of Google Books, it is
inviting you to flick
through a virtual
tome of facts and
random images. By
clicking a photo, the
experiment will use
machine learning – notably via the
Google Cloud Vision API and Natural Language Processing- to connect the image to content from Google Books.
It’ll then give you some recommendations.
Selecting View More shows an even larger number of
suggested reads, each of which is accompanied by a
synopsis and a link to Google Books. When you click
through, you can see where you can make a purchase.
It’s also possible to search for the book in libraries and see
more work by the author.
templates. You can choose your own
characters from Giphy’s searchable
set of stickers, select a background
and decide on some audio. When
your game is complete, you can give
it a title before having a play.
The entire creation process can take
less than a minute to complete and the
results can be shared with others.
Players are then free to remix and shareyour game, increasing the level of
engagement. We expect more
templates, games and options
to appear as time goes on.
arcade.giphy.comCreate your own games with Giphy
Quickly save web pages
to the Internet Archive
Explore stories using
an image
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