1) In the week of Christmas TV Ads being released , 10 Ad industry experts reveal their favourite ever Christmas TV commercials.

2) A lot going in the Music World this week. Apple is really taking on Spotify, Pandora etc… with its plans to push Beats Music out in it’s next iOS.

How big data in the music sector is bad news for music. The Shazam Effect– ‘Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business-but is it bad for music?’. This dynamic seems in tune with the trend in the movie business for endless sequels. Old ideas are tried and tested – and therefore good (?) ; whilst new , potentially more fresh and interesting ideas are risky and therefore avoided.

The Filter made a similar point about the homogenising influence of the web and data on society, in our blog a while back – Is The Web Really Making Us Weird ?

Meanwhile, Spotify Connect takes on Sonos amongst others, as it lets you play music through other devices and around your home.

I like this from The New Yorker – Is Spotify the music industry’s friend or its foe? ‘Even if Spotify does manage to survive Apple, it will take years to complete the paradigm shift to streaming. Meanwhile, album sales will continue to decline-even albums recorded by Taylor Swift. The labels, feeling the pinch in their bottom line, may try to squeeze more money out of Spotify, imperilling its future growth. They may even try to cash in their equity stakes. Proving that, while your enemies can indeed become your friends, the reverse can also be true’.

…and still with Spotify – see how much every top artist ( except Taylor Swift ) makes on this channel  We used Spotify’s stated payout range – $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream.

3) Everyone is talking about the Serial Podcast, where a ‘ A 15-year-old murder case is riveting the nation’. Serial is available on the wonderfully eclectic podcast channel  This American Life.

4) Great fun –  A Brief History of Failure from the NYT

‘What follows is – depending on how you want to think about it – either a gallery of technologies we lost or an invitation to consider alternate futures’.

5) Vape is the OED’s word of the year – and In case you’ve never frequented a vape shop, the word can apply both to breathing an e-cigarette’s vapour and to an e-cigarette device.

6) How  The End of the World was enacted on the streets of London (in 1961) – the filming of The Day The Earth Caught Fire ( from the British Film Institute ).

7) Yahoo looks to boost it’s search revenues at Google’s expense – by agreeing a deal to replace Google as Firefox’s Default Search Engine.

8) Video of the Broadway Hotel in Blackpool –  described as a ‘hovel’ in a Tripadvisor review. The hotel then fined the reviewers £100 , only then to subsequently reverse their decision. Although this is small scale, it is not the first occasion this has happened and adds to an interesting debate on customers freedom to make comments on social media and whether establishments can hit back at incorrect or even correctly bad reviews. For me, the best bit was the hotel saying that with rooms for £36 a night, customers should be a little more ‘realistic’ with their reviews.

9) Smile, You’re speaking Emoji: The rapid evolution of a wordless tongue.

10) This is nicely done I think – ‘Had I known my mother back then’ –  A girl photoshops herself into her mother’s childhood photos.

and finally…. thinking of moving to Staten Island ? The house from The Godfather films is up for sale – £1.84m to you…