Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Libby.
1. Ham Dog makes me CRI EVRY TIEM
I won’t be turning this into a rant about the number of sob stories blindly ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ on Facebook, but in a dig at the current state of our newsfeeds, Stephen Roseman posted the following ‘heartbreaking’ image at the end of last month:
Posted by Stephen Roseman on Wednesday, December 23, 2015
… a dog with ham on its face.
More observant Facebook users saw this immediately, while others were slower to realise they were being made fun of. The dog is fine and unhammed unharmed, and actually doesn’t even belong to Roseman, who pinched the pic from another Facebook user to create this ironic post that even he can’t believe has been so widely spread.
2. The Great Facebook Run
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t reading this year, he’s running. And he wants us to run too. A mile a day.
A Year of Running is a challenge and a public group on Facebook aimed at getting people to run 365 miles in a year. Zuckerberg reckons it’s not a ‘crazy amount’ and I guess he’s not wrong, as almost 90,000 members seem to agree. They’re sharing their running photos, talking about their experiences and awaiting updates from Zuckerberg too. Will we finally see the back of the dreaded the gym check in?*
3. #DrummondPuddleWatch
How did you spend your Wednesday? Watching a puddle? No? You weren’t one of almost 20,000 people that tuned into the live-stream (filmed by someone’s mobile phone blu tacked to an office window) of people crossing a rather large puddle in Newcastle?
Well you missed such gems as someone cycling through it:
Stop what you’re doing and watch this puddle on Periscope https://t.co/QyXMQr1W06 #DrummondPuddleWatch pic.twitter.com/vkj3Raurdd
— Mashable (@mashable) January 6, 2016
…the installation of a “slippery when wet” sign:
A guy just placed a ‘slippery when wet’ sign in the Drummond puddle and it’s amazing #DrummondPuddleWatch pic.twitter.com/akjYHE0ZHV — Elliot Wagland (@elliotwagland) January 6, 2016
… and the appearance of a lilo
BREAKING NEWS: There’s a man on a lilo in the puddle #DrummondPuddleWatch pic.twitter.com/DQNVzWzniy
— Elliot Wagland (@elliotwagland) January 6, 2016
Don’t worry if you weren’t one of the people captivated by the goings-on of a bit of water, you can still enjoy a slice of the action by purchasing a bottle of genuine Drummond Puddle Water!
4. Twitter to (sort of) increase character limit?
Earlier this week, re/code reported (for the second time) that Twitter is considering a 10,000 character word limit for Tweets. The 140 character limit is seen as Twitter’s identifier, and while DMs now have a limit of 10,000 characters, and small tweaks to Tweet formats (such as Twitter Cards and the ability to comment on a quoted Tweet) have been brought in, this limit still stands. So, is this the end of Twitter as we know it?… … Probably not. As Wagner’s article points out, many of us are already posting Tweets that are more than 140 characters long by using a shortened url to link to take readers to another source to read more:
“What’s really changing here, then, is not the length of the tweet. It’s where that link at the bottom takes you when you click on it – or, rather, where it doesn’t take you.” – Kurt Wagner, re/code
Here’s what Twitter’s CEO Jack Doresy had to say:
pic.twitter.com/bc5RwqPcAX — Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
5. Live stream of Lemmy’s funeral
Right, this hasn’t actually happened yet, but I’m using poetic license because it’s happening soon and I lurve Motörhead.
In case you missed it, one of heavy metal’s all-time-legends was killed by death just after Christmas. Lemmy Kilmister passed away at 70 years old after being diagnosed with Cancer just a couple of days before. While tributes continue to pour in, Motörhead is inviting all of us to ‘attend’ his funeral via live stream on their YouTube page tomorrow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSAXVdIj6jY
While this is obviously testament to Lemmy’s popularity, the streaming of his funeral caught my eye because I’d not heard of webcasting technology being used in this way before – imagine my surprise when I found that it had apparently been around since the early 2000s.
If you can’t make the funeral, why not show you support by helping get “Ace of Spades” to number 1 in the UK charts this weekend? Or by signing the petition to name one of the four newly discovered Heavy Metals in the Periodic Table “Lemmium”?
*no, absolutely not.