So Twitter's new strategy of fiddling around with things to show investors that they can make UI changes continues with an experiment in breaking the chronological order of the stream. I assume the plan is to crush all user resistance to this and then stuff people's feeds with more irrelevant ads, thus delivering the Facebook experience that Wall Street allegedly wants. Call me naive but I thought a lot of competition and positioning theory was centred around differentiation …

Following up on yesterday's Spotify Year In Music shenanigans, the A.V. Club has released its list of the least essential albums of the year. Pointless music at its finest, a truly horrendous collection. There's probably not much need to be concerned though, as the future of music has arrived, mostly unheralded. Jukedeck.com generates production music for videos on the fly. Pick a genre, select a mood and choose a duration and it generates the music for you. It even has a festive 'Make It Christmassy' button for added hellishness, though all this seems to do is smear jingle bells and Christmas song samples on top of whatever it had already generated.

Meanwhile the European Commission is still trying to break the Internet at the behest of wounded publishers. This is possibly the dimmest of all dim ideas, but the dogged determination with which it has been pursued over the last number of years is quite a sight to see.

Sportsing Corner

"National Women's Soccer League players earn an estimated 98.6 percent less than players in Major League Soccer, its male equivalent." And despite being World Champions the US national women's soccer team are still treated atrociously, because feeble wimminz just don't do sportsing right or something.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Information Is Beautiful, 2015 Awards Winners

Totally Confused

Aussie bitcoin, TITSUP, abandoned jumbos, Steorn's return and Octopus Raft latest.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Damn, it's December already. 'Best of 2015' lists are in full swing. If lists of books are your thing, here's the eighth annual Largehearted Boy big list of all the lists of books.

Spotify has a pretty presentation of some end of year figures which are mostly meaningless and firmly from the school of 'big figures are good'. It will also tell you what you've been listening to by season and present you with inexplicable pictures apparently connected to this.

You can look forward to a holiday season on Twitter marked by publishers posting more images than usual in an attempt to get to grips with what "we're introducing a richer photo experience on twitter.com" means for them. This will end when someone figures out how to reproduce longcat in three sequential tweets. Oh 2010, we were so young then! (Incidentally, when searching for "longcat joins Twitter" I got a lot of results for "Monica Lewinsky joins Twitter". I've no idea either.)

Not wanting to be considered second to Google in any sphere, Facebook has announced that it can abandon a whole load of half-baked unsupported projects too.

The Internet has replaced TV by becoming more like TV than TV itself.

If you really, really don't like a film and are asked to review it, you could learn a lot from this.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Top 25 News Photos of 2015'

Totally Confused

The McElvaney shuffle, the Sun making things up, pizza being made, close the Internet and Republicans holding dildos.

Finally, the title is a reference to politicians responding to last night's broadcast of an RTE investigation into standards in public office. The mood music emerging seemed to be that they wouldn't have failed to declare multiple commercial interests if the forms weren't just so damn hard to fill in.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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