Want to become a journalist? Facebook wants to help you

The days of using Facebook to procrastinate could soon be behind you.

In a blog post on Tuesday morning, Aine Kerr, Manager of Journalism Partnerships for Facebook announced that the social network is launching a series of online training courses for journalists.

What will the courses focus on? Well, as Facebook continues to make inroads in the media industry, the company is offering users a crash course in how to perfect their social media skills to survive online journalism in 2016. 

While the courses may seem completely unnecessary to many millennial users who live and breathe Facebook, if you're wondering how to achieve that beautiful, blue verification check mark on your account or looking to ensure no one from work sees those embarrassing pictures from your weekend in Vegas, you might consider giving them a try.

The courses, which will be updated regularly based on feedback, will be available through Facebook's global training program, Blueprint.

They range from an extremely rudimentary "Getting Started" course —  intended for new users (and perfect for technologically-inept parents) — to more advanced courses that enlighten people on the site's lesser known features.

Upon launch, an intriguing course called, "How Journalists Can Best Utilize Facebook and Instagram" will be available, along with other various courses such as Facebook Live, 360 videos & photos, and Instant Articles.

In the next few months, Facebook plans to translate the site into more than eight languages, in an effort to connect with more journalists around the world (and further its plan for total industry takeover.)

The company hopes that the social media savvy e-learning courses "will inspire tens of thousands of other journalists" to learn and create.

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You can now check weather.com via a Facebook chatbot

When IBM bought The Weather Channel for $2 billion in 2015, analysts were fairly uniform in their responses: What are they thinking?

Now, IBM is beginning to make clear how it is using this vast amount of weather and climate data that the company has collected for years on a second-by-second, worldwide basis. 

On Tuesday, IBM announced that The Weather Channel has launched a Watson-powered "cognitive weather bot" for Facebook Messenger.

 The Weather Channel bot gives users a new way to access and share personalized weather content including current conditions, severe weather alerts and five-day forecasts. 

As part of the merger, IBM gained ownership of weather.com, but did not purchase the cable network itself, which remains owned by a consortium of private equity firms and NBC Universal. 

The new bot will use IBM Watson's natural language and machine learning tools to get to know a user's preferences for weather information, according to an IBM press release. Over time, the bot will make recommendations about weather and news information. 

“At The Weather Company, we want to create the best user experiences, and that means providing weather information and content in any format people want to receive it,” said Cameron Clayton, the general manager of The Weather Company, in a statement. 

The bot is an interesting move for IBM and The Weather Company, since it could cause users who would have gone to weather.com or tuned into The Weather Channel to instead remain within Facebook's massive ecosystem. 

Giving up on that traffic and viewership is a tradeoff that the company feels is worthwhile considering the audience that can be reached on Facebook. 

“One billion people use Messenger every month, and most want to know how the weather will impact their day. The Weather Channel bot for Messenger will create a highly personalized experience for each one of those individuals,” Clayton said.  

The bot does, however, link back to weather.com's mobile website for extended forecasts. 

The bot can be accessed on The Weather Channel's Facebook page as well as the Messenger app.

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You can now check weather.com via a Facebook chatbot

When IBM bought The Weather Channel for $2 billion in 2015, analysts were fairly uniform in their responses: What are they thinking?

Now, IBM is beginning to make clear how it is using this vast amount of weather and climate data that the company has collected for years on a second-by-second, worldwide basis. 

On Tuesday, IBM announced that The Weather Channel has launched a Watson-powered "cognitive weather bot" for Facebook Messenger. The Weather Channel bot gives users a new way to access and share personalized weather content including current conditions, severe weather alerts and five-day forecasts. 

As part of the merger, IBM gained ownership of weather.com, but did not purchase the cable network itself, which remains owned by a consortium of private equity firms and NBC Universal. 

The new bot will use IBM Watson's natural language and machine learning tools to get to know a user's preferences for weather information, according to an IBM press release. Over time, the bot will make recommendations about weather and news information. 

“At The Weather Company, we want to create the best user experiences, and that means providing weather information and content in any format people want to receive it,” said Cameron Clayton, the general manager of The Weather Company, in a statement. 

The bot is an interesting move for IBM and The Weather Company, since it could cause users who would have gone to weather.com or tuned into The Weather Channel to instead remain within Facebook's massive ecosystem. 

Giving up on that traffic and viewership is a tradeoff that the company feels is worthwhile considering the audience that can be reached on Facebook. 

“One billion people use Messenger every month, and most want to know how the weather will impact their day. The Weather Channel bot for Messenger will create a highly personalized experience for each one of those individuals,” Clayton said.  

The bot does, however, link back to weather.com's mobile website for extended forecasts. 

The bot can be accessed on The Weather Channel's Facebook page as well as the Messenger app.

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Facebook shows off its experimental augmented reality app

LAGUNA BEACH, California — Facebook just gave an early look into an experimental camera app that uses artificial intelligence to make live video look like art.

Speaking Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal's WSJD Live conference, Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox demoed the app, which he said offered a look at how the social network is investing in augmented reality. The application aims to recreate the look of famous artwork in real-time within the camera using a technology called "style transfer." It's a bit like the app Prisma, except that the effects are created within the camera live, not after you shoot a photo or video. 

"Style transfer lets you take an artist like a Monet or a Rembrandt and transfer the representation of that style onto any image," he said. Cox primarily demoed a Starry Night-style effect but he said they also had styles for Georgia O'Keeffe and other artists.

Another look at that camera app Chris Cox demoed #WSJDLivepic.twitter.com/UqMRwWdVpD

— Karissa Bell (@karissabe) October 25, 2016

Behind the scenes, Cox said the app uses a new type of artificial intelligence technology called convolutional neural nets, as well as "some cool computer vision stuff."  

While apps like Prisma have used similar AI technology to create fine art-inspired images, they aren't able to process images or video in real time. 

"This is very interesting because it's taking something that was a known technology but it was getting it to be really, really fast on the phone and able to be done at a low enough latency that there's no issues with dropping frames or with stuttering or blurring or anything like that," Cox said.

FB's Chris Cox just demoed a prototype AR application that uses AI to recreate the styles of famous artwork live in the camera #WSJDLive pic.twitter.com/iuLcjT1Vm8

— Karissa Bell (@karissabe) October 25, 2016

The application also offers an interesting look into the social network's efforts in augmented reality and how it views the smartphone camera as an entry point to AR.

Facebook has been investing heavily in virtual reality, but the company's ambitions in augmented reality have been less clear, though Zuckerberg has previously confirmed the company is working on AR applications. The CEO also showed off a concept for augmented reality glassesat Facebook's F8 conference earlier this year. 

"This is something that's a prototype right now, it's not connected to any of our services," Cox said. "But it's an area of work we're really invested in which is making it easy for the camera to be an early application of AR."

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Decal transforms your iPhone into an exploded Galaxy Note7

Cue the LOLs, LMFAOs, ROFLs and ROFLMFAOs.

With the Samsung Galaxy Note7 now permanently discontinued and pretty much banned from all airlines worldwide, the jokes are now pouring in.

The latest jab at the Note7's woes is this iPhone decal skin from UNIQFIND called the "Explo-sung iPhone Skin" designed to make your iPhone look like it has an exploded battery.

SEE ALSO: 5 awesome Android phones to replace your Galaxy Note7

The product description reads: "We’ve come up with a merciless way to dress-up your iPhone this Halloween – as a burnt device! Introducing the Explo-Sung decal for iPhones. It's our hottestskin yet." 

On the bright side, it won't actually make your iPhone blow up.

The skin costs $25 or $35 with a hard case and will be available for pre-order with shipping in early November. It'll come in sizes for iPhone 5 all the way up to the latest iPhone 7 Plus. 

The Explo-sung skin joins other humorous takes on the Galaxy Note7 disaster like that one guy'sepic Note7 costume made of Note7 boxes that actually emit smoke.

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Geofeedia isn't the only social media surveillance company giving data to police

Geofeedia isn't the only social media surveillance company providing information to local police departments. 

Twitter shut off commercial access to Geofeedia on Tuesday after the ACLU revealed that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram data was being marketed by Geofeedia to police as a way to monitor activists and protests.

Facebook and Instagram had also recently severed much of Geofeedia's access to their networks for the same reason. (Mashable also uses Geofeedia to discover potential stories on social networks.)

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Based on information in the @ACLU’s report, we are immediately suspending @Geofeedia’s commercial access to Twitter data.

6:14 PM - 11 Oct 2016

 
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But social media surveillance companies are proliferating, and Geofeedia is not the only one that has seen an opportunity in marketing their services to police departments by telling police they could track hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter protests.

Media Sonar, whose website says it has "proven" to be a "powerful tool for assessing threats," was found to market their services to the Fresno Police Department, according to results of an investigation by the ACLU published in December, 2015. 

The ACLU found that Media Sonar had enticed Fresno officers by suggesting police monitor hashtags such as #blacklivesmatter, #imunarmed and #dontshoot. 

This, according to Media Sonar's co-founder who was not identified in the report, could "help identify illegal activity and threats to public safety."

The ACLU also found that Fresno police were using a social media monitoring software called Beware. 

Beware, which markets itself as a service that can create "awareness of potential threats," can assign a "threat level" to a social media user based on the information Beware can gather from that user's social media profiles. 

Beware can also attach a "threat level" to a person at an address at which officers are responding to a call. 

Intrado, the company behind Beware, won't publicly reveal how it assigns threat levels. 

Digital Stakeout, yet another company built on social media surveillance, was used by the Oregon Department of Justice to monitor activists using hashtags such as #fuckthepolice and #BlackLivesMatter. 

For the ACLU, the concern is that this growing industry is yet another form of surveillance being employed without transparency. 

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This chilling new 'Walking Dead' teaser may traumatize you for life

Fans of The Walking Dead have been obsessing about the identity of Negan's victim for the past six months, and on Sunday, Oct. 23, we'll finally learn who got a face-to-face introduction to Lucille when the Season 7 premiere debuts on AMC. 

In the meantime, Mashable has learned exclusively, brave viewers can put themselves into the unenviable position that Rick and his group have found themselves in, thanks to a new partnership between AMC and Facebook. Daring souls can visit MeetLucille.com and, by connecting their Facebook account to the site, play a harrowing game of eeny meeny miny moe with Negan himself. (And, to ease the trauma, enter to win tickets to the premiere taping ofTalking Dead.)

SEE ALSO: Find out who survived Negan's baseball bat in this brutal 'Walking Dead' sneak peek

Digital marketing agency 360i worked with AMC to bring the chilling activation to life, and according to Linda Schupack, head of marketing for AMC and SundanceTV, it was a no-brainer (pun intended) after the last scene in the Season 6 finale, which saw Negan savagely beating one of our heroes to death: "We knew that that was the scene that people would want to engage with, and we wanted to give people a way to experience it," she says. 

Facebook proved to be an ideal partner because it offered a more personal element for fans, Schupack explains. "It really allowed us to go beyond the sheer conversation that these fans were having around The Walking Dead and let the audience enter into this world and engage with it by pulling in their community to experience that final scene," she says. "The power of the show has always been 'what would I do, how would I feel,' so people are engaging with that show in that way in general, and this gives them a particular way to take it even further."

SEE ALSO: AMC to air two-hour 'Walking Dead' primer

From Schupack's perspective, it's illustrative of the evolution of social media and the role it plays in promoting a series — which has become as much about expanding the world of a show as about driving discussion around it. 

"All of these platforms are particularly exciting for us as marketers to think about how we can broaden and deepen the relationship between fans and the property," Schupack notes. "The opportunity to use these tools in new and exciting and entertaining ways to deepen fan engagement takes us beyond the conversation notion of social media and lets us bring people into the emotional experience."

The Walking Dead Season 7 premieres Sunday, Oct. 23 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC, and the network is airing a two-hour primer on the journey of the show so far beginning at 9 p.m. on Oct. 16.

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