We Love the Internet 2014/05: The Downworthy edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• What the long-form backlash is all about
• The winter of our discontent – another perspective on the cresting stream article from the 14/01 edition
• What is a million likes worth?
• Social media responsibility – a professional baseball player on being in the public eye
• Is Yahoo! even worth trying to save?

Reference points

• Debunking Princeton – great response from Facebook to a somewhat flawed academic study
• Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change
• Downworthy – A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean
• This six things that make stories go viral will amaze and maybe infuriate you – New Yorker on the Upworthyness
• A history of Gawker, by Reddit

Longer reads:

• Look Out, Television: Google Goes For The Biggest Advertising Prize Of All
• Facebook Turns 10: The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
• Sad YouTube: The Lost Treasures Of The Internet’s Greatest Cesspool

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to watch/listen to/play with:

• Jubilee Line Ticket Barrier Sings Blur’s Song 2
• Which obscure member of a Britpop band are you? – I’m some guy from Reef
• The Quietus Writers’ 50 Favourite Dance Remixes
• 8 bit renditions of well-known songs
• 54 jokes in four minutes
• The world’s tallest waterslide

This week on Tumblr:

• Tate Collectives –this is really good
• Who is Henry Kelly? Going for Gold nostalgia
• Metal albums with googly eyes
• Critical hand gestures
• Animals sitting on capybaras

Things to look at:

• Stuntmen from old films
• Fake signs in London underground
• 11 insane movie props you can buy on eBay right now
• More than 500 ‘confess’ to having drugs after police tweet

Animal corner:

• Bass players holding big dogs – in the same vein as bass dogs from the 2013/33 edition
• This dog is innocent
• Seal of approval

Tweets of the week:

• 1994 vs 2014 pic.twitter.com/Zg191VVokx
• look it’s an ewok! pic.twitter.com/VVlvuKPyg7
• DO NOT MESS WITH THIS COPY MACHINE pic.twitter.com/p3ZMasx1al
• They see me rollin’… they laughin’… pic.twitter.com/WZXyWQOYD8
• Cross your eyes and see what happens. pic.twitter.com/pLVqKwDhRw

Part 3: For the weekend

Long-form articles:

• Steve McQueen interviews Kanye West
• A Revolution, With Guitars: How The Beatles Changed Everything – 50 years since they first went to America
• Sex and the single tween – could be a worrying article for parents
• No second chance for Stephen Glass: The long, strange downfall of a journalistic wunderkind
• Almost everything in Dr Strangelove was true

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