27th February 2016
1) Very rarely do we start with a photo caption competition (see picture above), but this was irresistible. Do have a go and you can also see some other, rather amusing, suggestions here.
And on a (slightly) more serious note… Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Big Bet That Facebook Can Make VR Social.
2) Facebook moves beyond the ‘Like’ and rolls out ‘Reactions’ icons to all users – Like, is joined by Love, HaHa, Wow, Sad and Angry.
3) Play Nice!! – How the internet is trying to design out toxic behaviour. Has censorship become acceptable, now it is called ‘civil comment’?
4) The Independent was a newspaper killed by the Internet. ‘After almost 30 years of losing money, it was the cost of publishing a newspaper for so few daily readers – just 40,718 once free or discounted copies are stripped out – that had simply become unsustainable in an age where so much information is free online.’
Interesting then that the UK’s latest newspaper is launching without a website – the key of course is Social – ‘Instead of a website, the paper, which will sell for 50p (56 cents), will have a social media presence.’
And how journalists (online) are increasingly using editorial analytics to drive their editorial strategy – ‘This is important, because analytics can be about more than having a big screen with numbers that go up and down – and analytics should be about more than short-term optimisation of page views and unique users based on tweaking of article placement, headlines, and pictures used.’
5) Interesting development in the adblocking saga – Marketeers look to stop adblocking by offering free mobile data. (ht to @itsjimmyb)
6) Touched by the Devil. Explore Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in an amazing, annotated Interactive.
7) Umberto Eco passed away this week, here is some of his valuable advice to other writers – ‘You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences. If they come into your head, write them, but then break them down’.
Perhaps best known for The Name of The Rose, here is everyone’s favourite Italian monk (Sean Connery) in the eponymous film, also featuring a young Christian Slater.
8) Instagram, the photo-sharing social media platform owned by Facebook, has reached more than 200,000 advertisers. It has a broad span, with 75% of its advertisers, outside of the US.
9) Recognise this scenario? From The Washington Post – The baffling reason many millennials don’t eat cereal – ‘Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.’ Disclaimer – this doesn’t happen in my house… – plenty of millennial cereal eating and very little dishwashing!
10) Some great Hollywood focused data visualisations from @informationisbeautiful. This one looks at how factually correct some selected films are. Which is more of a true story – The Kings Speech or The Wolf Of Wall St?
Ronaldo becomes the first person to pass 200 million followers on social media.
And finally, fancy a bit of an adrenaline rush? Denny Hamlin Wins Closest Daytona 500 Ever With Insane Photo Finish.