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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As a consultant to Silicon Valley startups, Eyal helps his clients mimic what he calls the ‘narcotic-like properties’ of sites such as Facebook and Pinterest. His goal, Eyal told Business Insider, is to get users ‘continuing through the same basic cycle. Forever and ever.’ In Hooked, he sets out to answer a simple question: ‘How is it that these companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, can seemingly control users’ minds?’

The Internet is turning into one giant Skinner box. Though you knew that already, toiling away in the click mines as you are.

In Ireland the government is apparently going to sell people's private healthcare information without their consent. Because that's the sort of thing that happens when you put a selection of rogues and imbeciles in charge of something sensitive.

Slack going down the other day provided an excellent example of how to do customer support and crisis management communications correctly. Seems straightforward enough, but companies rarely get it as right as Slack did.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Welcomed to Europe'

Totally Confused

Sexiest Man Alive, kind kid, SlowSneigh, Taylor Swift is definitely in New Zealand and a very misguided ad campaign.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Listen to this while marveling at these people discovering they're on the air when they really didn't intend or want to be.

Anyway, on with the show. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the year is a pictograph or emoji. This made people angry because it was clearly selected to make people angry on the Internet. Applause all round.

Wild Speculation And Cock-Ups Special

After observing the now very short mandatory period of thoughtful solemnity and empathy following a terrorist attack, the wild speculation is in full swing.

Vice debunks the 'OMG terrists IN your Playstation 4' rumours.

The HuffPo theorises that the attackers might have been tripping.

The TVE channel in Spain attributed the Paris attacks to the Rebel Alliance.

A woman named Isis claims she's been blocked from logging in to Facebook.

More as we get them. Or not.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Ships Made of Concrete'

Totally Confused

Ben Carson doesn't know very much about foreign policy, Ben Carson doesn't know much about geography, Twitter censorship, why Rdio died and refugees are the worst.

Finally, Overstock.com is burying precious metals in a desert. Just because, you know, Armageddon is inevitable.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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There's now an app from Facebook to gather all your notifications in one place, which is of course just another way for Facebook to slither deeper into your mobile 'experience' and steal your precious interactions while you sleep. Surely this is a tacit admission that notifications are not at all working as intended and the apps on your phone or tablet have become like small children desperately competing for their parent's attention?

• 'Consider yourself on Notification'

Edward Snowden has a few tips about reclaiming your privacy over on The Intercept. They're pretty useful for anyone who uses the Internet or doesn't live in a cave. The main problem, however, is that a lot of this stuff sounds difficult and possibly beyond the ability of an average user. Also, most people are happy enough to use the devices and apps they're given with the out-of-the-box settings. Currently, convenience trumps privacy.

I mixed together a few New Orleans cuts touched by the hand of the wonderful Allen Toussaint over on Mixcloud. Serve it loud with lots of bass if you can.

Remember that fictional Modigliani I mentioned yesterday? Better hope it's not a naughty one, because the rude bits are being censored on the real one that's in the news at the moment.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'1927: Ireland in color'

Totally Confused

Tearful Sandi Thom, homeopathic constitutional crisis, Roald Dahl James Bond, things in books and Prince was right.

Finally, YouTube Music is here.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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That dating app you use? It doesn't work very well, because lots of people just don't like lots of other people. Amazing news.

If you should be lucky enough to find yourself a rich lover by way of an algorithm, this history of extremely high art prices might be of some use when persuading them to splurge on something nice to go over the fireplace.

When that's taken care of and you've got your feet up, admiring the Modigliani, spare a thought for the people in Mississippi the Internet forgot. Though those folks probably don't have to worry about putting on their dazzle camouflage makeup before they go to the shops.

Worth Pondering

(That's an official communication from an Irish government department there folks.)

Eye Candy

'New York Punk Then and Now: Touring Downtown Rock Haunts With Photographer David Godlis'

Totally Confused

Fallacies, listed, yourlogicalfallacyis.com, watching Shia LaBeouf, smoked puffin doesn't taste like chicken and no more Noma.

Finally, and to my great shame I have only now noticed that there is a Techdirt podcast.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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It's tough out there in the Internet trenches. Here are some brief dispatches from the front.

The life and times of someone who admins a number of Facebook pages of perhaps questionable value to the world.

Online polls are ruining democracy, or at the very least changing it quite notably.

Can we fix it with GIFs?

Legend in reference to an artist is often overused, but it's absolutely appropriate to the late Allen Toussaint. This BBC documentary from the year after Hurricane Katrina gives a good overview of the scale of his quiet influence on twentieth century popular music. The Vice has a nice tribute with many links, all of which you should click on. I kicked off a recent mix with his stunning version of "St. James' Infirmary".

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Tibetan Buddhists Gather for the Bliss Dharma Assembly', The Atlantic

Totally Confused

Skifall, dancing doge the first, dancing doge the second, a billion dollars for a form and a billion dollars in eight minutes.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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It's been a while since I did a quick roundup of Facebook creepiness. As I don't use it I sometimes find it hard to keep up with its privacy-comprising endeavours and efforts.

With 'singularity of smarm', Leigh Alexander puts her finger on the unnerving nature of the march of this latest wave of technology. We don't really want to be on first name terms with the machines living in the Uncanny Valley. We probably shouldn't want them to have access to all the delicious data they want to slurp from our phones either, but they're going to keep trying that as well.

Less visible is the rise of machine learning, which broadly attempts to make lots of powerful machines replicate the way a human brain works. It's how Google is able to recognise things in your photos and much, much more. Also supremely creepy. Now that they've open-sourced parts of the code everyone will be able to get in on some of this creepy action.

According to Forrester Research, next year is when we'll reach some sort of tipping point for privacy concerns. Of course the data grabbers are well aware of this and working to mitigate any possible impact it may have on their bottom lines.

"If we are paying Google for a service, it turns us from users into customers and that means we can hold Google more accountable."

Is this really the best we can hope for? A smidgeon more accountability?

Meanwhile Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web. Of course, if that's news to you well then you haven't been paying attention. What is surprising is how quickly publishers capitulated to Facebook in particular, which now has a very firm grip on their traffic and seems to be approaching a situation where it can dial it up and down at will.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'The Most #NoFilter Worthy Places on Earth'

Totally Confused

Best bots, Ben Carson's house, heavy Latin, "Doctor" Ben Spaceman and best vine.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Hail November! Stop doing whatever you're doing and read this! Used up my exclamation mark quota for the month already!

“My husband points out that I can now make the charts in Masquerade read anything I want them to,” complained one of Kit Williams’ correspondents. Another, a clergyman, wrote out of concern for one of his parishioners: “The problem is that she has become obsessed with the puzzle, and sees everything that happens to her in terms of it.” He was worried about her mental health, but even more about her soul: “Could you please, therefore, confirm definitely that there is no hidden religious or occult meaning to Masquerade?”

‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness

In excellent tech writing, Matthew Hughes manages to make the story of Windows XP non-upgraders fascinating.

Most of the towers and laptops Samuel sells have Windows XP installed using the same license key. Those tend to be the cheaper computers. Windows 7 commands a premium, so he saves it for the more powerful and expensive machines.

I wanted to know what the enduring appeal of Windows XP is, over fourteen years after it was first released.

'Why Windows XP Won’t Be Going Away Anytime Soon'

Finally, some sportsballing scribbling. This is a really great piece of writing about rugby culture in New Zealand, well worth it even if you've no interest in the sport now that it's not all over the telly any more.

“So where are you going next?” Daniell asks.

“Auckland grammar.”

“Good idea.” He looks me over. “But you should probably shave before you go. Last time I was there I had a beard and the coach told me I was setting a bad example to his players.”

I laugh.

“No,” he says, “I’m serious.”

'The making of an All Black: how New Zealand sustains its rugby dynasty'

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'New York City sends old subway cars to a watery grave in the Atlantic ocean'

Totally Confused

Highway to hell, 'Hi Marc', while Jeb was gone, terrible sports bras and Thicke as two short planks.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Yes, I'd been planning to get things going again, newsletter-wise, at the start of this month. Unfortunately events and good weather got in the way of that, but it turns out this is an incredibly auspicious time to be restarting a newsletter. That was the Harvard Business Review saying that, and if the Harvard Business Review says it so then it's obviously seriously business.

Anyway, let's get going.

Recently it's all been bacon and blimps. Bacon is bad. Communication about bacon is bad. Bacon is on Air Force One. Blimp is free. Blimp is down. Blimp is expensive and mostly useless.

the most brutal maltreatment that has ever been inflicted on the mother-tongue of the great English-speaking nations

Hell no.

Why Denis Redacted, why? Mark Zuckerberg: domination or revolution?

In magician news, David Mitchell is great on Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea and why Ged is the best wizard of them all. I try and reread the trilogy every couple of years because it is a masterclass in taut storytelling.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Portraits of Cats Shaking Themselves Clean'

Totally Confused

Speed of Animals, crowdsourcing stealth help, fairy census, "it's a made-up drug" and Ermahgerddon.

Sportsing Corner

As the Rugby World Cup winds down, it's time to revisit this piece of magnificent writing from way back at the start of the tournament. These sort of people are real. I have met them.

He is the guy at the pub who always talk a little louder than he needs to. He is the guy who tries to race you at traffic lights. He is a Twitter banter account in human form. He is the sort of person for whom the word “mate” is not a term of endearment, but a grammatical punch in the face, an axiom to be deployed at the start of every sentence like a capital letter.

'Matt Dawson: the great Hakarena irritant who will never be truly important enough to hate'

Yours etc., @loughlin

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