Webcurios 15/04/16

LET’S START WITH THIS SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT ALBUM, IMAGINING THE LIFE OF PABLO BY KANYE HAVING NEVER HEARD IT BEFORE! NO, WAIT, IT’S GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY HAVE DONE WITHOUT THE FACEBOOK F8 STUFF THIS WEEK, FRANKLY, BUT HERE WE ARE:

• Facebook F8 Overview: I’m chucking this at the top because I appreciate that you might want a general, actual journalist’s summary of all of the things that Facebook wanged on about this week, but I swear, if you just click on this and ignore all my carefully (ha!) crafted prose that is coming up then I will cut you (I won’t, obviously; I have no idea who you are or where you live, and frankly it’s not like my readership’s large enough to start alienating any of you with bladed physical assault, but I hope you understand that at the very least I’ll be hurt. Good). Oh, and if you’re interested in the BIG FUTURE stuff, this is a great piece of writing about what this all actually MEANS with regard to Facebook and the world (so frightening that that’s a totally legitimate sentence in 2016). (There is also our writeup – “Facebook’s F8 – Release the Zuckerbot” – Ed).

• Facebook Rights Manager: Facebook finally addresses the  issue of content theft on the platform, or at least the video-based side of it; content creators / publishers who see their videos getting ripped and reposted by others for FRAUDULENT NUMBERS can now use Facebook Rights Manager to tag videos to which they own the copyright; Facebook will then, using what frankly sounds a bit like magic, attempt to spot the same images being played on different videos – so spotting when someone’s just ripped and reuploaded stuff. There’s a lot of quite deep functionality here about rights and permissions, which if you’re a brand which publishes a lot of video is, I’m sure, very welcome indeed. Oh, and semi-related, it’s now easier to get integrated analytics for videos posted across multiple Pages, which is useful for multi-Page brands to see which of their properties are driving the greatest ‘engagement’ (sorry, but it’s early) with any given piece of ‘content’ (I’M SORRY).

• Instant Articles Really ARE Here For Everyone: I’m sure we’ve been saying this for MONTHS. Anyhow, they are now OFFICIAL, with their own website and everything; here’s Facebook’s prosey explanation of the things, again, and this is a really useful guide to setting them up. If you do lots of long-ish form written stuff then you might as well have a play with this, although I’m sort of ideologically opposed to us all blithely playing along with moves that cement the Hotel California-like status of The Network (as I am increasingly calling it, with caps, in my head).

• Welcome To Bots On Messenger: Or at least, BOTS FOR EVERYONE! After Kik and KLM last week, the floodgates open – watch every single ON TREND brand churn one of these fcukers out in the next couple of weeks, to questionable actual public utility but a great fanfare of self-aggrandising press screed. Anyway, this is some of the technical stuff about how to make them, in case you want to start bullying your tech team about it right now. Unsurprisingly, it took about seventeen minutes for this to be complemented by an announcement about, guess what, ADVERTISING! (in fairness, not 100% new information, but) – not yet open to all, but you’d bet your next of kin on this being a big line item in revenue projections for the next few years. Early reports suggest that they’re, well, a bit rubbish at the moment – the lack of standardised command vocabulary means that we’re sort of in a weird retro 80s limbo whereby we’re trying to second-guess the vocabulary the bots have at their disposal, like some sort of tedious, shopping-and-news-focused Infocom adventure. If you care, though, here’s a list of all the current Messenger Bots for you to play with – LOOK THEY HAVE ZORK!

• Facebook Live API: There’s a whole load of really rather interesting stuff buried in here if you’re the sort of person who wants to integrate Facebook Live into your existing broadcast and filming schedule – I can see TV going HUGE on this come the Autumn.

• Create Looping Facebook Profile Pictures From 3rd Party Apps: Basically you can now have a Vine as your profile picture, should you so desire. Look, I didn’t say that the quality of updates from F8 was consistent.

• Better 360-degree Video On Facebook: A set of updates designed to help users get more out of 360 vids (including a whole set of signposts to help them understand how the sodding things work), as well as an interesting update to analytics which shows publishers heatmaps of exactly where in the video people are focusing on, which if you did consumer product-type stuff is probably hugely significant in gauging potential consumer interest in a particular thing.

• Facebook Social VR: This gave me a headache and a not-insignificant jolt of future shock when I read it, I have to say – it sounds DREADFUL. Anyway, FB also debuted its weird sort of remote Second Life ‘let’s all wear Oculus and interact with our ‘Friends’’ avatars in some weird virtual third space through Facebook-thing; this is it, see if it makes you feel as uncomfortable as it did me.

• Autotagging Friends In Videos Is Now A Thing: Another reason to ensure that people don’t in fact capture your face on film, ever. I’m losing enthusiasm for this, can you tell? COME ON WE CAN DO THIS TOGETHER!

• The Facebook Save Button: I made that Hotel California reference up there as a sort of throwaway, but I’ve been thinking about this as I type and it’s weirdly, creepily accurate in a way. Additional proof: the Facebook Save button, which already exists on the platform but is now being rolled out to developers across the web – you can add a ‘Read Later on Facebook’ button to anything now, letting you go back to it to read through the Facebook app at a later point. Leave Facebook? Why would you ever want to leave Facebook? It’s so nice here; everyone’s so friendly! Noone ever leaves; you don’t want to leave, do you? No, that’s right, you don’t! Now, take a sip of your calming, warm drink and settle down while we show you another set of slightly stale memes and some of your loose acquaintances’ baby photos, and more targeted adverts than any sentient being should ever have to experience. Good. Good.

• Facebook Quote Sharing: I think this is really clever; simple, integration to share quotes from Kindle titles directly to Facebook. This is going to become a thing EVERYWHERE on the web, I can confidently predict.

• Sponsored Posts On Pages: Not actually part of the F8 jamboree, but BIG NEWS this; brands can now pay other publishers for posts on their Pages, and therefore leverage (sorry) said Pages’ reach and audience for BETTER CONTENT REACH AND DISTRIBUTION. There are rules and guidelines, but as an extension to your local market influencer outreach stuff, this is BIG NEWS. Will also come as a relief to all those Pages who have been trousering cash to post things for months on the sly and who were technically breaking the rules.

• Buy Tickets Through Messenger: It’s another bot, basically, this one from Ticketmaster. Which means it should be up there, really, but my whole sense of how this is all fitting together has been absolutely SCREWED by all this Facebook stuff, sorry. Anyway, think this is quite interesting particularly w/r/t touting / bot marketplace stuff (cf Facebook’s REAL PERSON policy).

• Dropbox Now Integrates With Facebook Messenger Too: So there. Potentially useful for filesharing with customers, etc, if you’re looking for a customer services solution, maybe.

• Facebook Changes The Rules On Text On Images: For those of you whose professional lives involve worrying about whether or not you have too much text overlaid on an image to comply with Facebook’s Page guidelines, I am so, so sorry. But also, you should probably know that it’s a bit different now. Not better, just different.

• Instagram Rolling Out Suggested Videos: Coming soon, to the Instagram Explore tab! You know what this means? What’s that? A better-curated selection of video goodness from your favourite people and brands, pumped straight to your phone? Well, er, possibly, but what it also almost certainly means is A NEW WAY TO ADVERTISE! *sighs*

• Twitter Launches First View Adverts: No idea how much this costs, but I’d wager it’s LOTS – Twitter announced a new ad unit the other day, which lets a promoter pay £lots to ensure that their promoted video is the first thing that targeted users see when they fire up the app or website – with autoplay video, that basically works as a preroll for Twitter, which now I think about it sounds so fcuking irritating I’d probably avoid any brand that did that to me on principle.

• Twitter Moments Now Work With Soundcloud: Effectively turning Moments into a potential playlist vehicle. Which is of little or no use to you seeing as Moments is still a ‘curatorial’ exercise and this open to all, but if you’re a brand with a lot of money and a link to music then I would expect Twitter to start making fluttery-eyelash ‘come hither’ gestures at you and then nicking all your money for a piece of this.

• Watch Vines Like Telly: Vine introduced a new ‘Watch’ feature this week, which I saw described somewhere as a sign that ‘old people’ had won – the feature creates a constant flow of new Vines from any given channel, one after the other, like some sort of exhausting stream of 6-second “You’ve Been Framed”-type LOLs, which sounds dispiriting in the extreme to me, but there is DEFINITELY something in here in terms of new ways of storytelling (again, sorry) or interesting things you can do with the ordering of your films.

• Twitter Doesn’t Drive Traffic: WHO KNEW?! Oh, we all did. Sorry.

• Snapchat Launches Stickers On Video: Christ alone knows what the children will do with this; I feel so OLD and so TIRED. If you do too, this is a potentially helpful / useful guide to Snapchat and how to do stuff on it, although to be honest it’s almost certainly too late for you. YOU’VE BEEN LEFT BEHIND, GRANDDAD.

• Tesco Launches IFTTT Channel: I think this is really smart; Tesco’s had an API for YEARS, but it’s now linked to IFTTT – meaning you can now set it to, say, drop items into your basket should they fall below a certain price threshold (Casillero at £5? EMPTY THE SHELVES!), or purchase eggs on a Thursday. Interesting antidote to the EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ON FACEBOOK new bot ecosystem.

• A Wonderful Tourist Site: After a frankly overwhelming tsunami of s*c**l m*d** news, this is a balm to the soul. A REALLY lovely piece of webwork by Humboldt County tourist board, letting you watch a series of short video vignettes of lovely places in the area tourists could visit; you can hit space whilst watching to add anywhere you like the look of to your personal itinerary, which is then saved as a map with directions, places of interest, accomodation and dining suggestions and the like. The UI here is really rather good – take a look.

• BUPA and the FutureHeads: I was late to this last week, but this is the best healthcare digital thing I have seen in YEARS, except possibly that sexual health game from Nottingham NHS Trust which featured that supervillain with penises for arms shooting sperm at people. This uses the band to showcase the importance of having a working body to keep the SWEET MUSIC OF LIFE playing; I can only say that, personally, I currently feel like I’m down to the triangle and the castanets and even they’re flagging.

LET’S TRY SOMETHING FROM LIL’ KIM (YES, HER) WHO IS BACK WITH A NEW MIXTAPE WHICH IS ACTUALLY PRETTY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER MR WHITTINGDALE IS A DEVOTEE OF THE MUIR ACADEMY (WHICH I AM AT PAINS TO POINT OUT IS, LET US REMEMBER, NOTHING TO DO WITH WEB CURIOS’ AUTHOR), PT.1:

• Chatty Maps: After all the naked commercialism of the above (how DARE companies attempt to be successful and make money, eh? Christ, what a predictable, teenage lefty bore I am), this is a nice antidote. Chattty Maps looks to…er….map city streets based on their sounds, classifying each depending on its prevalent audio profile and creating colourised city streetmaps as a result. Now, I’m not going to claim that it’s 100% accurate in its aural assessments (the street opposite me, for example, doesn’t sadly sing with the sounds of nature as the map seems to currently suggest), but the outputs and the idea are lovely. Take a look.

• The French Meter: This is such a good idea, to the extent that I don’t think it can be 100% new, can it? Anyway, the French Meter is an app to help with your French pronunciation; you speak into your phone, and it compares your strangled attempts at gallic insouciance with the recordings of actual French people to gauge exactly how atrocious your accent is. I sent this to the only Frenchman I know (HI NICO!) this week to see what it made of his accent, but as yet I don’t think he’s tried it out yet.

• The First Choose Your Own Adventure Book: Called ‘Treasure Hunt’, and from…er…ages ago, this is a wonderful hit of nostalgia – far more of the Enid Blyton school than the Ian Livingston, it’s interesting to see how little the mechanics of these things have changed. Also, frankly, playing this is going to be more interesting than whatever professional tasks you have on your plate right now, so indulge yourself. Let the inner child FREE!

• BitBonkers: Another audiovisual representation of the IMMENSITY OF BITCOIN, creating a cascade of different sized and coloured balls to represent all the transactions going on around the world RIGHT NOW. Oddly reminiscent of those strange magnetic ball sculpture things that were popular in the 80s (YOU KNOW), I could watch this all day. Mesmerising.

• Good Email Copy: A whole load of examples of ‘good’ email copy from companies around the world, giving examples of how to do ‘Hello, welcome’ mails, confirmations, etc. Skews very much towards the tech/startup world, and the tone of a lot of this stuff veers quite sharply away from what I might turn ‘good’ and instead towards ‘cloyingly cheery and frankly a little too much like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation for my liking’.  

• Do You Speak Tourist?: I love that this exists. A great website set up by (I think) the Parisian administration designed to help Parisians deal…better with tourists coming to visit. Containing useful hints and tips about what different nationalities like, and are like, this is actually really rather sweet and nowhere near as comedically stereotypical as one might initially have hoped. All in French, obviously, so the degree to which this will amuse you will depend on your ability to read foreign; can we just take a moment to imagine how WONDERFUL something like this would be for Londoners? CAN SOMEONE PLEASE WRITE ONE?!?! Anyone from VICE reading this, seriously, this would be GOLDEN.

• The Mushroom Ninja: No ninjas (although on reflection they might just be hiding), but lots of mushrooms – an Instagram feed of uncommonly pretty mycology. Loads better than you’d think, and really quite interesting.

• The Start Page: A website collecting a whole load of different booting up animations from a whole load of old operating systems; if you’re nostalgic for the sound and visuals of your PC rebooting in 1997 then this will give you an unparalleled hit of retro. Take the least tech savvy person in your office, put this on their browser on fullscreen, and watch them get very confused indeed.

• Flappy Vape: After the bloke who programmed it into Super Mario the other week, it now appears that programming Flappy Bird into unlikely places is a THING. Witness this (very impressive in a sort of pointless and hypergeeky fashion), whereby someone somewhere has programmed a vape pen to play Flappy Bird on its little LED readout screen. I wish I used my spare time this productively (the most pathetic thing about that statement is that it’s not even really a joke).

• More Tracks Like This: A N Other music recommendation service, this one mashes Spotify and Pandora. Simple, but might throw some semi-interesting recommendations your way.

• Webkay: A simple website which tells you EVERYTHING that your current browser knows about you. Which is sort of weird – on the one hand, it’s a bit creepily impressive and a useful reminder of how much we are being tracked everywhere we browse (and if, like the majority of us, you’re on Chrome, how much information we’re giving Google just by being online); on the other, this pales into insignificance when compared to what we’re telling Facebook every second we browse the web whilst logged in. The upshot? EVERYONE IS WATCHING US.

• Botlist: BOTS! WE NEED A BOT! WHAT IS YOUR BOT STRATEGY! Seriously, go into a meeting with a client TODAY and drop that bombshell – you’ll have a speculative white paper gig within MINUTES, guaranteed (free consultancy there, kids!). Botlist is a(n almost certainly already out-of-date) website listing all the bots currently available across all the platforms – Kik, Facebook, etc. Useful if you want to see what other people are doing, and what’s currently IN VOGUE in the world of slightly shonky automation.

• Calm: What is it with the scions of the OLD startup web (Acton Smith, Tew et al) all getting BIG into mindfulness over the past few years? The coke ran out? Middle-age kicked in? Regardless, ANOTHER online tool to help come to terms with, you know, LIFE and modernity and stuff comes in the form of Calm – a website which lets users set up a MEDITATIVE SPACE with a peaceful background and audio track, which can then be shared with other users online through Twitter and other networks to create shared meditations online. Because NOTHING, and I mean nothing, says I AM A CALM AND CENTRED BEING like having one tab out of 19 displaying a photo of a Japanese temple and some panpipes. Obviously.

• Kite: This may be good, this may be awful – as a non-coder I really couldn’t tell you. Kite sells itself as a ‘coding companion’, delivering assistance and suggestions to help coders as they…er…code. This will either be superuseful, pulling in suggestions on publicly available solutions to coding problems from the web on the fly, or the most irritating thing in the world, like Clippy for JS. YOU DECIDE!

• Quantify: This looks REALLY clever; an app which lets filmmakers tag footage as they film it – meaning you can timestamp and rate clips as you go, leading to LOADS of time saved in the edit. This is such a smart idea, and if you spend lots of time making films then I’d definitely give it a go.

• Lorem Dimsum: You can probably work out what this is without me explaining it to you; if you’re designing a website for a new oriental eatery then this might be for you.

• Natural Cambodia: It’s really easy, if you’re me, to get all cynical about the web, and people, and Facebook in particular (bloody Facebook *shakes fist, impotently*); occasionally, though, you find projects which just make you think “oh, everyone’s just quite nice really aren’t they?” – this is onesuch. Natural Cambodia is a Facebook Group where people post photos of nature they have taken in Cambodia but which they can’t identify; the community then works to tell them exactly what that bug/plant/strangely-toothed marsupial might be. That’s it! Nothing else! A lovely example of community development which brands could probably learn a thing or two from in terms of harnessing the power of interested individuals to help, etc.

• 2001 A Gif Odyssey: You want over 500 gifs depicting pretty much the entirety of Kubrick’s 2001, from start to finish? OH GOOD! Suggest you pick one colleague and simply reply to every single one of their next 500+ communiques using nothing but loops cribbed from this site, just because.

• Lightwork: So this is actually pretty shonky, but bear with me here as there is an IDEA. It might be a crap idea, but. Lightwork is a site which lets you set up an LED array using something called Flickerstrips (basically a programmable strip of LEDs for the home); you use the interface to choose the colourpattern you want, and you can then watch this pattern come to life on an actual LED array in some bloke’s house somewhere in the US. Which is about as dull as it sounds, frankly, BUT the site also lets you download the short film of the pattern as a gif, which is where the IDEA comes in – I REALLY like the idea of something like this which lets you set up and create real-world gifs; is there some sort of fan service thing that can be done here? Live gif studio with INFLUENCERS making them for you on the fly? Something in conjunction with the ability to make looping animations as your FB profile shot? Has this been done before? I’m wittering, aren’t I? MORE TEA!

• Urban Rail: Statistically speaking, it’s likely that at least one person reading this is a secret, closet railway network enthusiast. This site, collecting maps and information about urban railways the world over, is for YOU. Don’t be ashamed (but, at the same time, please feel free to never talk to me about your hobby, ever).

• Rage Yoga: A rare instance of something being featured in Private Eye before Curios (I am slipping), Rage Yoga is either satire or madness but I’m unsure which. Purporting to be a form of yoga which actively encourages cathartic anger and profanity, if you’ve ever wanted to scream whilst yog-ing then this is possibly for you.

• The Finnish Wartime Photo Archive: A wonderful collection of wartime photography from the Finnish WWII archives, featuring pictures both from at home and at the frontline, and the best collection of military reindeer you or I will probably ever see.

• Obscura Day 2016: Obscura Day is a THING, apparently, and it is happening TOMORROW! Organised by Atlas Obscura, and sort of an adjunct to thinks like Open House day, the idea is that places around the world open up to be explored. It’s mainly North American, but there are a couple of London things at Westminster and Tower Hamlets cemetary, and it’s a generally lovely idea should you wish to get involved.

• GUM Play: The unfortunate side-effect of capitalising GUM is that it invariably puts one in mind of ‘genito-urinary medicine’, which lends the concept of ‘GUM Play’ a slightly different air. However, if you’re able to keep your mind away from that sort of thing (sorry) you will discover that this is in fact the latest iteration in the SMART TOOTHBRUSH market; basically, a thingy that you stick on the end of your brush which tracks movement to determine whether you’re cleaning your teeth properly and lets you play games, etc, while so doing. Not novel per se, but I really like the musical application (brush to play songs), and the news idea is quite clever (brush to get headlines in the morning read out to you). Looks slick, though obviously just a gimmick.

• A Neural Network In Your Browser: This is quite (read: very) techy, and sort of more interesting in theory than output, but if you’ve ever wanted to get a better understanding of how neural networks actually operate, with some simple visual examples of how they parse information, then this is pretty good. COMPLICATED, mind – this stuff is quite…*hard*.

• Photographs From Obama’s Visit To Cuba: As far as I can tell, this is SPONSORED CONTENT from some camera manufacturer or another (hence the brand name write massive in the headline); that aside, though, these photos of contemporary Cuba are rather lovely – and one or two of the pictures are phenomenally framed.

• SpaceX Photos: Seeing as we’re doing pictures, have this selection from last week’s triumphant SpaceX ‘Oh, wow, this really is the future’ rocket-landing-on-a-drone extravaganza.

• Behind The Name: A website which will give you all sorts of information about the background, history, geographical spread and etymology of any given forename; wonderfully, it also gives you translations of any name you give it, which means if you want to start annoying people by referring to them by their name in a variety of foreign languages then you now can.

MORE NEW HIPHOP, THIS TIME FROM TATE KOBANG WITH HIS MIXTAPE ‘SINCE WE’RE HERE’!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER MR WHITTINGDALE IS A DEVOTEE OF THE MUIR ACADEMY (WHICH I AM AT PAINS TO POINT OUT IS, LET US REMEMBER, NOTHING TO DO WITH WEB CURIOS’ AUTHOR), PT.2:

• Lewk: Are you a man? Do you HATE shopping? Would you like to outsource all responsibility for your wardrobe to a mysterious algorithm which will, if you let it, send you clothes up to the value of $XXX each month based on what it thinks your taste is? I mean, to be honest I’d be totally up for that (other than the suggestion that I might have a monthly clothing budget – HA! Biennial, morelike). I would love to know whether there’s actually any software behind this, though, or whether it’s actually people pretending to be software (this happens, you know, lots. Back in the mid-90s, I once spent a summer in a windowless room, working for Nationwide Building Society. They couldn’t afford voice-recognition call-routing software in the mid-90s, so instead hired me and two other poor fcukers to sit wearing headphones, listening to calls coming in, hearing people say ‘one’, ‘two’ or ‘three’ after a series of menu prompts, and then pressing the appropriate button whilst the customer was fooled into believing that there was some high-tech magic at play. It’s rare that you can *actually* define a job as ‘kafkaesque’, but I think that counts).

• I Grew Up Star Wars: Pictures of people back in the day enjoying Star Wars stuff. Depending on the point of view, the fact that this is happening for a whole new generation nearly 40 years hence is either a lovely example of the enduring power of popular culture or a terrifying example of the power of advertising. Your choice there.

• Hippo: You know that asking the web to help you by photoshopping stuff is such a guaranteed route to LOLs that even marketing departments are onto it and are gaming it now (really, this was not a naive mistake)? This is sort of the antithesis of that; Hippo lets you submit your photos to a ‘community of photoshop experts’ through the app, for them to improve them however they see fit; these pictures are then available for others to view, including steps taken by the artists to apply the effects seen. Actually a nice idea, particularly for aspirant photo editors, but I’m buggered if I know what the ‘shoppers are getting out of the experience as the whole thing is free.

• The Wine Project: You know that feeling you get when you’re drinking but you’re not drunk, but the booze has just taken the edge off and you’re feeling NO pain, and you already know that you are going to have another and it is good, and everything’s funny and light and full of, you know, possibilities, and maybe you WILL have that cigarette because fcukit, it’s the weekend, and you DESERVE it, dammit, and maybe I will text Darryl because it’s been weeks since I last scored and…ahem. Sorry. This photoseries captures the photographers friends at four stages – after 0,1,2 and 3 glasses of booze. The worse abstinence-promoter you will ever see; I mean, it’s 9:26am as I type this and this has made me WELL want a booze (I am resisting the siren call of the fridge, mum, in case you’re reading this).

• The Poetic Router: I could explain this, but they do it SO much better: “It is a middleman router designed on a Arduino Yun (readily available as one of the favourite IoT module running openWRT). It connects to your home router and then creates an Access point for other devices to connect to it directly. Once connected, it now knows the ip address of the machines(computer) and can monitor the traffic going to them from servers. On click of a button it does that. Then it scrapes the data for finding the server links. Once it lists down the links , then with the help of a terminal based browser it pings each one of them and downloads the text on their html page. From the created corpus it generates the poem and runs it through a speech engine which then is passed through an USB audio channel to a FM transmitter. That’s when you hear the poet recite.” Lovely.

• Le Grand Bazar: SUCH an aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed, this one. Really very calming indeed.

• Book In A Box: Interesting idea, this one. Internet relic Tucker Max (remember fratire?) has stopped getting drunk and writing about it for thick-headed fraternity lunks, which is reasonable given he’s over 40, and has instead started a company which productises ghostwriting. Aimed squarely at the deluded, arrogant business guru end of the market, Book In A Box charges around $20,000 for the whole process of writing your bestseller for you – from outline to finished manuscript, based on a series of interviews with you, the author. The part of me that actually likes books and thinks that writing is actually a sort of proper talent (yes, yes, not one that I possess, fine) is appalled by this; the part of me that admires someone who can spot a market is really impressed. I can imagine this becoming really rather successful.

• Velocipedia: Can you draw a bike? Go on, draw one now. I’ll wait. *waits* Ok, so look at it – would it work? This is the premise of this project, in which drawings of bicycles from memory are rendered in 3d by Gianluca Gimini, showing how rare it is that we can actually recall something properly. Some of these are GREAT, if totally impractical – I would like to see this as a real-world exhibition, please, thanks.

• Virus Trading Cards: Pharma companies looking for SHAREABLE CONTENT – a) here you are; b) pay this nice Phd student actual proper cashmoney to make more of this stuff for you.

• Film Dialogue Analysis Motherlode: Alongside the Guardian’s good-if-expectedly-depressing look at who gets the most crap in the comments section (spoilers: WOMEN! whodathunkit?), this is the best example of data journalism this week; the visualisation and the way it all just fits together is beautiful, and (another) great example of how far this stuff will go if you take the time and trouble to make it look good (yes, fine, films are a popular topic, and sexism always gets teh clicks, but this was EVERYWHERE this week, which considering the site itself is a new publisher is pretty good going).

• Habito: FULL DISCLOSURE: my friend weird Scott off the internet works on this, BUT it’s good even without that fact. Habito is a really rather interesting company which is seeking to automate the mortgage application process, automatically scanning all available mortgage deals, seeing which you’re eligible for, getting in touch with the provider…all within a matter of minutes. Very smart, with an indication that they will be automating more of the services (renewals, etc) as the product matures, this could be really very big indeed. DISRUPTIVE, as I believe the kids say.

• The Umbrella Cover Museum: In the same manner that there is, inevitably, bongo of everything on the internet, there should be a parallel rule around the fact that there is nothing so niche or ostensibly mundane that someone, somewhere, won’t collect and display it. So it is with the Umbrella Cover Museum – you had no idea, did you, that those little waterproof sheaths (not, on reflection, a pleasant word, that – sheath) were so pregnant with stories and interest? It’s been going 20 years and is, according to the homepage, raising money to BRING THE MUSEUM TO ENGLAND. I think that that’s a project which Web Curios can firmly get behind, so consider this an OFFICIAL ENDORSEMENT (you can quote me on that, Nancy).

• Glued: A common problem of family life (I say this as though I know anything about it; I am so not into such concepts as to have once had the following statement rhetorically shouted at me by my mother as I prepared to go out one night: “What do you contribute to family life, Matthew? FCUK ALL, that’s what”. She had a point) is that everyone is so busy staring at their magical internet distraction boxes that they simply don’t communicate any more. O NOES! What better way to fix that than with a smartphone app? Erm. Anyway, Glued basically gamifies (haven’t used that word in a while) the process of not looking at your sodding phone, awarding points for inactivity and letting families compete with each other. I’m going to hazard the opinion that maybe, just maybe, if this is the best ruse you can muster to get your family to prefer spending time with each other than with the infinite distraction boxes then you might have one or two other problems.

• Kids Drawing Necklaces: These are BRILLIANTLY dreadful. You know those ‘we will make a soft toy from your kid’s amusingly shonky drawings’ websites? This is like that, but for jewellery. You too can own a necklace which looks like the distressingly deformed depiction of ‘mummy’ spazzed out by your jam-fingered progeny! Suggest you buy one of these for a parent in your life and then film their reaction as they open it, for the lols like.

• 90s Indie Film Polaroids: SO SO GOOD. Jason Rail, who was obviously *someone* in 90s indie cinema, is INstagramming a load of old polaroids from way back when. Featuring all sorts of GREAT shots of 90s stars (seriously, a quick scroll will net you Beyonce, Heather Graham, Lisa Kudrow, er, Roseanne Barr…), these are brilliant. You could spend a long time here, be warned.

• Spoil Me: I presented this on Twitter as something for people who didn’t actually like films very much so that they could talk knowledgeably about movies with people who do, this presents a series of spoilers for any film you care to mention. Want to know what the BIG TWIST in the latest blockbuster is without having to go through the tedium of actually watching it? This is for YOU.

• Photobomber: Simple but poleasing quiz which invites you to complete sentences with hints based on the top-rankedFlickr photo for certain particular words. Look, just click, it’s actually pretty self-explanatory and it’s not MY fault I’m struggling with the descriptors (again) this morning.

• WikiHow Guessing: Guess the title of the WikiHow article from the cartoon illustration accompanying it. Some are obvious, some are obscure, all will convince you that WikiHow is a deeply odd website that contains some…questionable advice.

• Happy Couple: Apparently the secret to a happy relationship is communication; what better way to communicate with your partner, then, than via the medium of faceless tap-tap-tapping on a mobile phone? NONE! This is Happy Couple, which lets you and your partner answer various questions about each other and your life together, sort of in the style of Mr & Mrs, and then discuss your results. This sounds HIDEOUS, frankly, but your mileage may vary.

• MarkMaker: There was an automatic logomaker in here last week, but this blows that one out of the water. MarkMaker is a site which lets you type in the name of your company or business and then spits out a variety of logos for you – you tell it which you like, and it automatically develops and refines these based on your preferences. I’m not suggesting for a second it can replace a designer, but frankly I now have an EXCELLENT Matt Muir logo which I am going get tattooed forthwith (if you would like to get the Matt Muir logo tattooed, please get in touch).

• Public Information Films: The BFI continues its crusade to kill productivity in workplaces everywhere by putting a whole load of brilliantly retro public safety films online. From Charlie Says to all those terrifying ones featuring mop-haired 70s children of the corn getting electrocuted after carelessly flying their kite into a substation, I would personally happily attend an evening screening of a few hours of these.

• Barbie Savior: Barbie, on Instagram, in the guise of a white woman going to SAVE AFRICA through her high-profile charitable works. Insert whichever celebrity you feel most appropriate as the butt of this one.

• Warm Presents: Sadly it’s now practically summertime and so you’re unlikely to need these for a few months yet, but it’s probably worth buying a load now in advance of the inevitable November cold snaps – knitted pants for men, with conveniently knitted…er…cocktubes (sorry, but that’s what they are). Coming, inevitably, to a stag party near Ljubljana, soon.

• Koze: Kickstarter for an inflatable, go-anywhere hammock. Included almost entirely because, well, is it just me or does it look awfully labial? Please say it’s not just me.

• The Centre for Corporate Studies: An excellent website skewering startup and business speak. The most terrifying thing is that the following sentence, describing the fictitious institute, could well be lifted verbatim from an actual website: “The Center for Corporate Studies is a best-of-breed, high-level institute with a core competency in leveraging the power of language to develop personal, synergistic paradigm shifts within each of our students. You’ll learn how to champion mission-critical learnings across all verticals resulting in high-yield growth, for both your organization and your personal brand. “ Fess up; we’ve ALL written something like that.

• Smarttress: Most depressing link of the week! You know how the internet of things is going to connect everything we own to the web, so we ca monitor it and track it and know exactly what temperature our sofa is at every single moment of the waking day? In the spirit of that comes Smartttress, a mattress with inbuilt sensors which can track how people are using it and when – so that you can in theory tell if it’s being used for sex when you’re not there. Take a moment to let that sink in. Your mattress can spy on a partner you suspect of infidelity. Welcome to the bleak, bleak future, my friends.

• Nosajthing: Web Curios favourite Nosajthing has a website for his forthcoming No Reality tour, where you can listen to his EP and play around with a variety of simple geometric animations for each track. It is GREAT, play around with it.

• Almost Forgot Me: Mobile only, this one – load up the website and use your phone’s camera to track your heartbeat and determine the pace of the track and the accompanying animation. A nice idea and use of tech, but a special mention has to go to Anders from the developers, who saw on Twitter that I was having trouble making it work and emailed me to ask what phone I had and what exactly the problem was, and then looked at recoding the site to fix it. Which is a stellar attitude, and which means I now recommend Hello Monday as GOOD PEOPLE.

• Morning Makeup Madness: I have never tried to apply makeup whilst on the tube, but I imagine this game is a pretty accurate representation of what it’s like.

• Play Zork in Facebook Messenger: Look, men in your 40s, I’m not going to judge you for this. Go on.

LAST UP, LET’S HAVE A BIG WEEKEND HOUSEY MIX FROM LEE FOSS – THIS IS GREAT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Vomit Inducing: One of the best collections of horrific inspirational rubbish culled from Facebook. So good that you might be tempted to start posting one a day to see how people react – possibly a good experiment should you be feeling like culling a few ‘friends’ from your life.

• Ben Affleck Looking Sad: He’s looking at the Captain America reviews.

• Pls Revert: More horrific corporatespeak. Sadly now dormant, but there’s some wonderful horror in here.

• Dan Smith Pointing At Things: A cursory Google suggests that this is Dan Smith of slightly-dull pop people Bastille with the pointy finger; it’s stuff like this that makes me get some small inkling of how odd it must be to be a famous. Imagine living in a world where someone wanted to make something like this about you.

• Fake Buddha Quotes: No, Buddha did not say “dance like noone’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt”. He really, really didn’t.

• Texturings: A really rather useful repository of texture files. If you do graphics and design this is worth bookmarking.

• Pokemon Sketches: Sketches, of Pokemon. Because it is a trend that will NEVER DIE (seriously, Pokemon is like Star Wars for a whole generation of kids – seminal, and around forever. Just imagine).

• Classic Programmer Paintings: If you code then this will be SIDE-SPLITTING. If you don’t, send it to the people in your office who do and watch them split their Red Dwarf tees with mirth (SORRY SORRY SORRY).

• Dirty Zootopia Confessions: You know that Disney film that’s out now about the version of our world with no people, just animals (it’s called something different in the UK, isn’t it? Zootropia?)? This is a site compiling all the filthy things that some furries thought when watching it. Sort of NSFW, and almost certainly NSF your sense of childlike innocence and wonder.

• Mime Academy: Absolutely the best VR gag yet, hands down.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• 56 Women Writes Everyone Should Read: A brilliant selection of nonfiction pieces by women over the past 56 years, there are some classic pieces in this list and some all time great authors. Worth putting all of these into your ‘read later’ pile; aside from anything else, there’s a really interesting ‘changing role of women / perceptions of gender’ thread running through these if you read them chronologically.

• Emoji Miscommunication: It turns out that perhaps emoji aren’t the solution to human communications after all, and that those little yellow blobs can, by dint of their differential representation based on your phone’s OS, cause quite a lot of confusion. WHODATHUNKIT?! Has anyone created an Urban Dictionary equivalent for emoji yet? That’s a GREAT stunt for Collins, in case anyone from there is reading.

• The Death of 3Pac: Strange and sad story about the life and death of Ryan Harryman, a kid who gained 4chan fame by rapping, poorly but committedly, under the name ‘3pac’ (better than 2pac, do you see?); really interesting on the nature of microfame and community and, tangentially, about performance art and hiphop and the internet.

• How Empowerment Became Purchasable: A great piece about how the term ‘empowerment’ has come to have a multivariant meaning in popular culture, particularly as it pertains to women, and how it’s now as much something packaged and sold as a commodity as it is anything ‘real’ per se. Addressing the plastic (to me, at least) versions of the concept peddled by entities as diverse as Sandberg and the Kardashians, it’s smart if a little disheartening.

• How Boots Went Rogue: An excellent piece of longform by the Guardian this week, taking as its starting point a pharmacist at a Boots store in the midlands and uses it to tell the story of how private equity buyouts have transformed the nature of the business and, by extension, the lives of those who work for it. A brilliant microcosm of how capital at scale works, globally, in 2016, and how it defines the lives of all of us in ways we probably don’t spend enough time trying to understand.

• 1993, The Greatest Year In Rock History: In case you’ve missed the recent spate of people claiming ‘No! The year I turned 21 is the greatest in musical history’ (as someone who turned 21 in 1990. I am unlikely ever to make this claim), here’s an argument for 1993 as the greatest year in Chicago’s rock history. A great, slightly fuzzy look back at the growth and spread of grunge, and some top-class 90s rock royalty anecdotage for good measure.

• When Radiohead Built A Bot: they were 14 years ahead of the curve, the gits, when they built GooglyMinotaur.

• The Minecraft Generation: Seems a touch late to the party, this piece on Minecraft, but it’s a brilliant piece of writing and it really does nail what makes it a special piece of software, particularly for the under-11s; the manner it feeds off and rewards curiosity and experimentation is wonderful, and the breadth of application of the lessons it can teach shouldn’t be underestimated. If you have kids who are, or were, in its grip, you will very much enjoy this. Similarly, you should probably also pre-order the lovely Keith Stuart’s forthcoming debut novel ‘A Boy Made Of Blocks’, which will explore many of the same themes.

• Welcome To The Terrifyingly Convenient Future: A really smart look at what the bot ecosystem might actually mean to how we consume things, and who exactly controls what it is that we choose to consume. The points it makes about the Amazon Echo service (you know, the speaker that sits in American homes, eavesdropping on their conversations) are fascinating and frightening – our choices will be constrained by the bots, or more accurately those who program them. Not great news for market pluralism.

• Lunch With Farage: Look, none of you will ever vote for him (will you?), but you can’t deny he makes an entertaining FT Lunch profilee. Strong boozing, and just enough caricature euroscepticism to make it endearing. You probably wouldn’t have actually wanted to be there, mind.

• Small Supa Tough: A year or so ago I featured a VICE piece about the nascent Ugandan film industry, which since that piece has become something of a cause celebre online, much as Nollywood did a few years back. This is a far better, far more in-depth look at the industry and how it’s developing in light of all the attention – several bits made me laugh out loud, not least the quotes from the VJ overdubs of the films (“YES IT IS TRUE UGANDANS LOVE SUPER ACTION!”) which I maintain should TOTALLY be done here by someone; seriously, red-button alternative soundtracking with genuinely funny people riffing over classic films? GOLD, I tell you. Anyway, this is great – but it’s also sort of sobering when you consider the fact that it’s easier for these people to make CGI helicopters on their laptops with cracked software than it is for people in Uganda to get 24h electricity or, you know, afford a fridge.

• When Bitcoin Grows Up: John Lanchester in the LRB on Bitcoin, its history and its evolution. The best thing I’ve yet encountered explaining how it works and why you should care about it, this is really very useful indeed.

• The Crazy World Of Post-Production CGI Facelifts: And body lifts. Basically all about the fact that we simply don’t really need actual actors anymore, at least not beyond facial and physical mocap. Imagine – it’s actually someone’s job to airbrush the wrinkles and cellulite from every single frame of AN Other famous’s latest film. What a time to be alive.

• How Famouses Get Paid For Club Appearances: Or, ‘Being a minor-league Kardashian’. It’s MADNESS.

• The History Of Content Moderation: A really interesting piece about the history of moderation of online communities, looking at all of the big player s(YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and asking a series of really interesting and important questions about the degree to which the usage guidelines of these platforms – and their enforcement – determine cultural discourse to a staggering degree. Will make you think about the extent to which mores are defined by these gatekeepers/arbiters.

• How To Be The Shakespeare of Facebook: I mean obviously not that, and this is basically a guide to writing better posts on The Network, but it’s ALSO a really interesting 101-style guide to a whole load of literary concepts such as rhetoric and is actually far smarter than you’d expect. If you’re interested in writing and language then this is a surprisingly good refresher/primer, honest.

• The Iceberg: One of the week’s most beautiful pieces of writing, this is an excerpt from Marion Coutt’s memoir ‘The Iceberg’, about discovering that her partner has a brain tumour. It’s gorgeous and sad, as you’d expect, but the prose is truly wonderful. Give it a go.

• The Ferryman: Strong contender for longform piece of the week, this is the story of a man in Afghanistan, retrievig and burying bodies for money on behalf of US forces. Touches on the war, the Taliban, religion, respect and much else, and paints a picture of the area so evocative you can feel the dust on your lips. Beautiful.

• The Great IP Address Fcukup:A great piece of real-world, present/future dystopia, all about what happens when millions of IP addresses get attributed to your real-world location (spoiler: nothing good).

• Exposing the Crimes Of Assad: Ah, Syria! The enemy of our enemy is our friend! Bashar, old pal, old mucker, you’ll help us out with those IS people, won’t you? Great! We’ll…er…gloss over the past few years in exchange for you helping us maintain an illusion of control in the region, right? Great! Long and extremely depressing account of the Assad regime in Syria, and how people have been working to smuggle evidence out of the country about exactly what has been done to people over the course of the past 3-4 years. Chilling – and whilst the rhetoric is ‘we’ll have enough evidence to out-Nuremburg Nuremburg’, you do sort of wonder what type of bargaining’s been done with dear old Bashar behind the scenes.

• BONUS MIDDLE EAST HORROR: Probably the best writing of the week, though, is this piece, which ranges across the whole of the region and presents a series of vignettes from Libya, Syria and elsewhere which simply serve to illustrate just how many unpleasant shades of grey are involved in everything happening in the region. Wonderful writing, incredibly depressing.

• The Suicide Survivor Stories: A reddit thread containing stories of people who survived suicide attempts, and how they felt when they realised it hadn’t worked. I found this almost unbearably hard to read, but if you are feeling very, very sad then I recommend that you take a look – the overwhelming feeling amongst survivors is “thank fcuk that didn’t work” so, you know, take a moment.

• Being Thrasher: Finally my favourite piece of the week – not the best written, but the most fun – is this profile of the editor of skate bible Thrasher – a 50something year old big punk kid, who embodies the spirit of the mag and its culture like few other editors I can imagine (the Anna Wintour of the vert ramp). This is a great piece, will make you smile (whether or not you know or care about skating) and will also make you feel incredibly, terribly square.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is called ‘Threads’ and it’s by a band called ‘Once Upon A Dead Man’ which may or may not have something to do with Charlie Simpson who used to be in Busted. Anyway, the song’s rather nice but the video, featuring all sorts of CGI…er…threads, is great. Also, interestingly / depressingly the video’s been done by a marketing / branding agency. ODD:

2) Next up is this, by Zulu. It’s called ‘Your Grace’ and the animation is brilliant, stylised and contains some of the finest handheld-vacuum eroticism you will EVER see. Nice track too:

3) I’ve always quite liked Death Cab For Cutie, though I appreciate they’ve also been a byword for a particular type of cardigan-wearing hipster faux–miserablism. This is their latest, called “Good Help (Is So Hard To Find)”, which is seemingly all about the difficulty of finding REAL FRIENDS as a famous (boo hoo). The accompanying video animation is brilliant and I love it rather:

4) Probably the least effective music video ever, seeing as you can’t actually hear the song or the (imaginary) video, this wins ALL the points for being annoyingly clever-clever – the song you don’t really hear is called ‘Day Wave’ by Stuck, and instead of actually showing a video, the video is Mark Hoppus of Blink182 fame, being filmed ‘watching’ and commenting on the ‘actual’ video (if you see what I mean). So arch it might actually fall and hurt itself:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! It’s been TIME since I had a Fire in the Booth on here, so take a listen to this effort from the commendable Miss Banks – it’s very good indeed:

6) MORE UK(PSEUDO) HIPHOP CORNER! This is called ‘Prince’ and it’s by Jorja Smith, and it features Maverick Sabre who I ordinarily think is pretty mediocre, but her vocal here is wonderful and the video’s great and I think she will be FAMOUS (is she already? Not to me):

7) Best animation of the week is this, to accompany this rather beautful French pop song called ‘Ma’agalim’ by Jane Bordeaux. Watch it all the way through, it’s really gorgeous:

8) A slice of the mid-90s now, with the most triphoppy track I’ve heard in years. This is Shura with ‘The Space Tapes’, and this took me back all the way to the Beta Band and Portishead and the like. It’s GREAT:

9) Finally the most internet video of the week – by Gerald Casale of DEVO, for the track ‘It’s All DEVO’ – it’s ODD. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

* = Note: We have decided to remove the names of the alleged celebrities involved in this incident to avoid being furnished with legal threats. But it’s OK, we’re still standing. – Ed