We Love the Internet 2015/10: The Cybergoths dance to Thomas the Tank Engine edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Getty and Fox team up for Unfinished Business stunt – photo-shopping the cast into stock photos
• Yes to the dress?
• The unstoppable rise of mobile gaming
• The State and Future of Netflix v. HBO in 2015
• Netflix is Absolutely Incredible, But Risks Everything
• Why products fail
• Every Second Counts in Bid to Keep Sports Fans

Reference points:

• Top 10 emerging technologies of 2015
• Where Does BuzzFeed Source Its Content From?
• A survey of all the current innovation in text as a medium

Longer reads:

• The smartphone is the defining technology of the age
• Marissa Mayer has completed step one
• The Art of Authenticity: A Conversation with PostSecret’s Frank Warren
• What Blogging Has Become

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch:

• Cybergoths Dance to Thomas the Tank Engine
• Scary Crane Climb in Dubai
• American Kids Try Breakfasts From Around the World

Things to look at/read:

• 26 People Who Failed Harder Than You Ever Thought Possible
• 3 Billion People, One Building
• The best rapper alive, as decided by computers

Animal corner:

• The Kitten & The Ducklings
• Drunk Squirrel had too many crabapples
• 19 Dogs Handling Cats Like Pros
• Cat Gets its Teeth Brushed
• Little pig eating chips and making fun noise
• The 18 Most Historically Important Moments From The Great Llama Chase Of 2015
• Rich Dogs Of Instagram

This week on Tumblr:

• Awkward couples
• Before They Ran
• Werner Herzog Inspirationals
• Sad Kanye
• Feminist Anne of Green Gables
• Art History’s Burn Book

Tweets of the week:

• And this, people, is why I love the Internet. #WeaselPecker
• Me too Mr Vice President Biden. The Yanks. A great bunch of lads.
• We are truly in the Golden Age of Television
• Very happy to announce that i’ve renewed my contract with asda and will continue working weekends for the near future
• Amazing The Thick Of It style photo from @GawainTowler at Margate Ukip conference
• Functional Dance Moves
• Take me down to Paradigm City where the grass is typical and the girls are standard.

Part 3: For the weekend

Reference points:

• Stephen King’s “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes”

Longer pop culture articles:

• Inside WWE: An Exclusive Look at How a Pro Wrestling Story Comes to Life
• A Yeezy for all seasons – one person attempts to determine the greatest Kanye song
• Inside the Great Ice Cream Parlour War
• Burn After Reading – on the anarchist’s cookbook
• Slow Change May Pull Us Apart: The Oral History of Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’

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We Love the Internet 2015/09: The Pics or it didn’t happen edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting – and the perceived lack of referrals
• This is how Apple beats Spotify
• Network News is dead. And it should be – the opening line of an opinion piece from Michael Rosenblum
• Has Apple’s Tim Cook predicted the death of data-driven marketing?
• How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked—and Played

Reference points:

• Who Learned the Most from the New Yorker’s Jonathan Ive Profile?
• Why Most Online Video Companies Will Fail
• Untangling your digital life (while embracing it)
• How to predict technology flops
• 22 Movies Every Designer Should Watch On Netflix

Longer reads:

• ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ – the mantra of the Instagram era
• Internet slang meets American Sign Language
• How Japan’s Line App Became A Culture-Changing, Revenue-Generating Phenomenon
• How Madden ratings are made – scouting for videogames
• Almost famous: The semi-glamorous life of emerging YouTube stars
• Fanfare For The Common Brand – a Slideshare presentation

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch:

• Limp Bizkit vs. Seinfeld – Break Stuff
• Joshua Path “The Contender” – 1 guy, 51 rock stars, 3 minutes
• 50 Shades of Buscemi
• Freaks and Geeks – Uptown Funk
• Taylor Swift vs. Nine Inch Nails – Shake It Off (The Perfect Drug)
• 0hn0 – a game
• ASCII rock

Things to look at/read:

• Las Vegas from the sky at night
• Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
• The Photoshop awards: missing limbs, John Terry and Helicopter Shark
• 24 Things That Should Never Have Been Allowed To Happen
• 24 Fails That Prove Karma Really Is A B*tch

Animal corner:

• Early Morning Shenanigans with Fiora – the skunk
• Our fluffy snow-loving creature – Nala compilation
• 18 Adorable Sheep GIFs To Ring In The Lunar New Year
• Elsa shovelling the hockey rink
• Tiny dachshund dog saves life of giant St Bernard stuck in two feet of mud
• 21 Vines That Get Cuter Every Time You Watch Them
• Try To Make It Through This Post Without Smiling

Tweets of the week:

• How it would look if the Reading / Leeds line-up only included the acts that have a female musician in the band.
• AND FINALLY, BEST PICTURE NOMINEES AS EMOJIS:
• I love Twitter
• Kanye is at nandos and said “im just gonna stand here on this table so you can all take your photos” hahahahaha 😂what

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• The Hidden Story of Harley Quinn and How She Became the Superhero World’s Most Successful Woman
• Stupid & Sophisticated: The Rise & Rise Of The Seven Nation Army Riff
• Some Hollywood extras suffer, but others are rolling in it
• Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo
• I Wanted to Be a Millionaire
• The White Devil Kingpin

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We Love the Internet 2015/08: The 300 awesome free things edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The Sabermetrics of Effort
• Apple’s not-so-secret weapon in streaming music – and why they might buy Tesla
• MIT Invents A Social Network You Can Wear
• A Year of @Pharrellhat
• Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever
• Why I’ve found that online communities on media sites always seem doomed to fail
• I bought 90,000 Twitter followers for my sadly lamented dead cat for £25

Reference points:

• 300 awesome free things – from image optimisers to collaboration tools
• The internet music video database
• Bechdel test results through time
• Fast Company’s 50 most innovative companies 2015
• The BuzzFeed Editorial Standards And Ethics Guide

Longer reads:

• We know how you feel – how facial recognition is being used in research
• The shape of things to come – a (very) long profile of Jony Ive – summarised here
• Why Teens Love YouTube’s Grace Helbig
• The revolution wasn’t televised: The early days of YouTube
• How The New York Times Works – the logistics of making a newspaper
• Project management e-book
• You have no idea what happened – on our ability to recollect

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch:

• Make a sculpted dog cake
• Who Is the Top Second Banana? – vote for the best ever sidekick
• Motoneige Vs Montagne – sliding down a mountain
• You Won’t Be Able To Stop Watching These Mini Food Cooking Videos
• Super Awkward Montage of Students Mistaking Video for a Stills Camera

Things to look at/read:

• Front of Jeep ‘Frozen in Time’ in Frigid North Carolina Parking Lot
• How to build an Oscar winner
• Immersive Michael Jordan Simulator Is the World’s Coolest Basketball Court
• Exploring the Movie Art That Traumatized You as a Child
• 23 Individuals Who Took Fail To Stratospheric New Heights
• New tattoo removal cream promises to fade ink, doesn’t hurt and only costs £3

Animal corner:

• Baby tortoise eating a bean sprout
• Toddler and piglet
• Cat and Owner chasing a bug
• 48 Times Tumblr Was Funny About Animals
• Schnauzer walks several blocks to find owner in the hospital
• 19 Confused Puppies Learning About Water
• Hamilton the Pig Savouring the Flavour

This week on Tumblr:

• Jim’ll paint it
• Art history’s burn book
• Tinder in Brooklyn
• Photoshop your dreams

Tweets of the week:

• Ladies, if a stranger on the Internet offers you Kittens and Nutella, they might be ISIS
• Tim Sherwood looks like he’s about to appeal for the safe return of his stepdaughter, but you already know he did it.
• We’re at the lowest level of ROFLing since 2004: http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=rofl&cmpt=q&tz= … If you were planning to LOL today, consider a ROFL instead.
• #recap A benefit of farting on the bus
• “Dude, those Mushrooms we found are making me feel weird. The Bamboo leaf just told me to stop eating his people.”

Part 3: For the weekend

Reference points:

• 17 Easy Dinners Everyone Should Have In Their Arsenal
• ‘Saturday Night Live': All 141 Cast Members Ranked
• Converse sample library
• All 86 Best Picture Oscar Winners Ranked

Longer pop culture articles:

• Why the British Are Better at Satire
• Catching a Beating at the Super Bowl of ‘Super Smash Bros.’
• Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
• The public life and private doubts of Al Sharpton
• The murder that obsessed Italy

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We Love the Internet 2015/07: The Harder Better Faster Stronger edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Internet-Connected Sheep and the New Roaming Wireless
• The next internet is TV – on ownership and distribution
• Facebook’s insane mobile takeover is just beginning
• TV’s new girls’ club
• What Research Tells Us About Making Accurate Predictions
• Apple’s new market – modularisation and integration
• Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

Reference points:

• How to sound smart in your TEDx talk
• Open strategy – resource of industry tools
• Poem: The Internet from A to Z, 2015
• The internet of useless things
• 64 Ways To Think About a News Homepage

Longer reads:

• Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth
• How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life
• 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned
• The Four Horsemen: Amazon/Apple/Facebook & Google–Who Wins/Loses (15 min video)
• The town without wi-fi

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch:

• The Daft Punk console
• How Many Of These Badly Drawn ’90s Footballers Can You Identify? – 14/17
• Parents Explain The Birds and the Bees
• Draw your own neon flames

Things to look at/read:

• This barber will publicly shame your misbehaving kid with an old man’s haircut
• Passenger shaming
• How I Built a Barbecue Restaurant in Brooklyn: What Happens When a Restaurant Dies
• 31 People Who Make Worse Decisions Than You
• 17 Images You Won’t Believe Aren’t Photoshopped (Part 14)
• 30 Compelling Photographs Taken By Google Street View
• 26 Pictures That Will Make You Want To Burn The Internet To The Ground

Animal corner:

• Copy cat
• Oscar loves bubbles
• Owl dance-off
• This turtle moves with a lego wheelchair
• 27 Dogs Living Their Best Life
• Dolphin Peekaboo
• 27 Dogs Who Prove They Can Be Huge Jerks

Tweets of the week:

• Roy Hodgsons trip to the salon didn’t go as planned
• Fantastic
• Couldn’t remember the Roman numerals for 51, 6 and 500.  Livid.
• My favourite Twitter moment of the day: bravo @Gordonwdarcy

Part 3: For the weekend

Reference points:

• The 50 best films of the decade so far –part 1 and part 2

Longer pop culture articles:

• The Billionaires at Burning Man
• I quit my job to set up a post-apocalyptic commune
• Why testosterone is the drug of the future
• I Wanted to Be a Millionaire
• The most successful sports bettor
• Booze, Sex, and the Dark Art of Dealmaking in China

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We Love the Internet 2015/06: The New clues edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The Digital Future of TV Networks & The Original Series Crunch – ie SVOD services care more about retention than ratings
• Why Did Everybody Do the Harlem Shake?
• Fusion’s Real Future manifesto – the latest in the line of First Look/Vox/FiveThirtyEight style personality-led news sites
• Links are broken. These three alternatives have improved our readers’ reading experience.
• Facebook is improving the News Feed by directly questioning real-life testers
• The Cathedral of Computation
• Introducing the Supertweet

Reference points:

• New clues – an update to the Cluetrain Manifesto
• The pop up event idea generator
• The Creepiest Things You Can Do on Facebook
• Digg By The Numbers, 2015 Edition

Longer reads:

• 16 things – big trend piece from venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz
• The last relevant blogger – profile of Carles of Hipster Runoff
• One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake
• Shutterstock’s creative trends – based on their photo library
• From 0 to $1B – Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch:

• Football fights and brawls
• Mr Selfie – on our smartphone obsession
• Mash-ups of Smash Mouth’s All Star
• The count censored

Things to look at/read:

• What’s Up With That: Why Do Cats Love Boxes So Much?
• Breaking Madden: The Superbowl
• Beauty in the blackboard jumble
• Random images from Google Streetview
• 10 ridiculous Japanese inventions
• 24 Times Pranks Got Taken To A Whole New Level
• 32 Reasons You Should Need A License To Use Facebook

Animal corner:

• The littlest police dog
• Magic dog
• 3 Week Old Boxer Puppy Howling
• A distinctive cat’s Instagram page
• A Pitbull-Dachshund Mix Exists And No This Is Not A Joke
• 29 Times Cats Continued To Be Complete Jerks

This week on Tumblr:

• The cruellest opt-out forms
• Why is Tom Delonge sad?
• Food that looks like Iggy Azalea

Tweets of the week:

• This is like a boy band photo for wolves 
• Look, Trevor, it meets the damned spec. Get off my back.
• Mission Statement:l I want to cure cancer AND turn people into dinosaurs
• This is probably the best LinkedIn phishing message ever (just arrived in my email, BTW)
• This was my 1st ever tweet and the inspiration behind this account.
• Katy Perry’s Halftime in a nutshell
• I don’t remember where this comes from, but it fills me with joy.

Part 3: For the weekend

Reference points:

• 49 British Swearwords, Defined
• 14 animal cams

Longer pop culture articles:

• Cheryl Stearns was on a mission to collect her 20,000th skydive, until things down on earth got complicated
• The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland – story of an 18 year old who was attacked
• Chipotle: The Definitive Oral History
• Tom Brady cannot stop
• The Gacy files
• Let’s Go Eat a Goddamn Snack: The NFL Cleanse

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We Love the Internet 2015/05: The Browse endlessly edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The Rise of TV’s Second Season
• Uber’s Business Model Could Change Your Work
• Netflix’s secret special algorithm is a human
• Two Years Later, Pharrell’s “Happy” Is Still Revolutionizing the Music Industry
• Don’t try too hard to please Twitter — and other lessons from The New York Times’ social media desk
• Amazon changed the price of the Bible over 100 times in five years

Reference points:

• The American Room – ethnography through a web-cam
• Netflix’s Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards
• The 15 things every modern marketer should know about famous brand building – from Brainjuicer
• A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Chris Dixon About Venture Capital and Startups
• Ray Kurzweil’s Mind-Boggling Predictions for the Next 25 Years

Longer reads:

• Moneyballing music – using big data for A&R
• A Massive Social Experiment On You Is Under Way, And You Will Love It
• Shut up and spend: inside the electronic music money machine
• Cicada: Solving the Web’s Deepest Mystery
• The future of Medium
• Digital, Social & Mobile in 2015 – updated slideshare from We Are Social
• Can the internet be archived?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch:

• Netflix Introduces New ‘Browse Endlessly’ Plan
• CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music
• Lars Andersen: a new level of archery
• Blade Runner Ambient Deckard’s Apartment Sound for 12 Hours
• The world’s biggest gif

Things to look at/read:

• 17 Alan Partridge Quotes On Taylor Swift Pictures, Because Why Not
• A few notes on grumbling
• Why men outnumber women on earth by 60m
• Notes from putting 35,000 hip-hop songs on shuffle
• Nature photographs taken on a table-top
• Chill the hell out
• 34 Of The Most Glorious Moments In Fail History

Animal corner:

• Elephants in a paddling pool
• I built my rabbit a cart and now he delivers me beer!
• Quickest Way To Get Your Energetic Puppy To Sleep
• Goat discovers self in mirror
• 19 Super Sneaky Ninja Cats
• 27 Pit Bulls Who Will Definitely Brighten Your Day

Tweets of the week:

• “Pornography”. But you need to write it in the search bar. RT @rupertmurdoch: Po
• Anyway, by adding googly eyes, you can make the Apple logo look like a bear skidding to avoid an American football.
• How graphics have evolved from 1997 to 2015. Amazing
• Hold my beer while I hit this jump.
• My grandpa went to get his passport photos done but pressed the wrong button 😂
• [guy shows me pics of kids in his wallet] Cute, check this [opens wallet/shows pics of me just sleeping & having disposable income]
• A dude is gonna explain something! Hooray!

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• The aging of Abercrombie & Fitch
• Training, Tanning, and Branding With The Bikini Bodybuilding Stars Of Instagram
• The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Ukulele
• Can Yakov Smirnoff, the king of cold war comedy, make a comeback?

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We Love the Internet 2015/04: The Scaled back-end edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Breaking the Rules: How the Serial Podcast Achieved its Insane Popularity
• Facebook Is Eating the Media
• Our Content Feed is Broken
• Where The New York Times Is Redesigning News
• There’s Too Much Damn TV – 1,715 series were on US TV in 2014, 352 were scripted
• Navigating Amazon’s Strange, Occasionally Successful, Borderline-Incoherent TV Strategy
• The Week Your New Year’s Resolution to Exercise Dies – using Facebook check-ins to uncover behavioural trends

Reference points:

• The best thing about Wikipedia is Spoken Wikipedia – features examples
• CES 2015 Recap for Makers and Product Managers
• Teletext on the internet

Longer reads:

• How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian
• How Google search dealt with mobile
• How Rap Genius and explainer sites are killing music journalism
• The Bacon Boom Was Not an Accident
• The Weird Science of Naming New Products
• A brief history of management consultancy in America

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch:

• How Many ’90s Premier League Stars Can You Name? – 14/17 for me
• Get Inspired by Our Leslie Knope Wisdom Generator
• This 4 Year Old Kid Plays Nunchucks Like A Little Bruce Lee
• Microsoft announces Windows Holographic with HoloLens headset
• 300 films edited into one trailer

Things to look at/read:

• The stock photobomber
• If Hermione Were The Main Character In “Harry Potter” – vs the patriarchy
• The strange world of professional footballers’ websites
• 23 Ideas That Prove People Are Dumb And Never Think Ahead
• 24 GIFs That Prove Absolutely Anything Can Happen In Sports

Animal corner:

• The Amazing Story of Roo
• Dog confused by squeaky toy
• 27 Cats Who Really Nailed Being A Cat
• French Bulldog Asks to Go On Couch
• Dexter the rat hates broccoli
• This Adorable Seal Can’t Stop Cuddling With Its New Dog Friend
• 16 Farm Animals Snuggly In Their Winter Sweaters

Tweets of the week:

• The future of news?
• Woah! This just happened on my twitter feed, took my brain ages to work out it wasn’t intentional
• Making the ILBT community proud
• How the media will line-up from Private Eye via @Kevin_Maguire
• I think this might be one of the greatest telly moments I’ve ever seen.
• Sick of ads that use unrealistic, photoshopped images. I mean, come on – when is the Central Line *ever* that empty?

Part 3: For the weekend

Reference points:

• 2015 National Magazine Awards Finalists

Longer pop culture articles:

• The rise and rise of the spornosexual
• What It’s Like to Date Your Dad
• From guilty pleasure to Emmy Awards: The delightfully weird history of Lifetime movies

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