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Things of note for the week ending Sunday DECEMBER 4th, 2016.

YES, that’s right: DECEMBER.

Time flies when you’re having fun, right? DECEMBER, people!

1. PUTTING YOURSELF UNDER THE GRILL OF EXPOSURE

Timely brilliance, via The Oatmeal.

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2. FACEBOOK CREATIVE HUB

Do you do ANY kind of Facebook marketing or advertising? Then you need Facebook Creative Hub. In closed beta since the summer, it’s just opened for all and sundry and YOU need to be using it.

Want to know what your ad campaign might look like as a carousel ad? Want to actually make a mock up of a Facebook Canvas ad? FINALLY you can do all those things with Facebook Creative Hub.

AT. LAST.

You’re welcome.

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3. DEALING WITH GRIEF THROUGH CINEMA

Cinema touches people in myriad ways. The visceral feeling of escapism that it can bring is unmatched for those that adore it so. But what if that place was shared with a loved one? And that loved one passes on?

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4. ‘MILLENNIALS’ IS A USELESS TERM

I’ve been saying it since about this time last year (slide 63 is what you’re after) and many others have said it before and since. That said, it is nice when someone else comes along and smashes the nail on the head so perfectly that you can’t help but share it.

Step up, Sir Jed of Hallam.

This time taking the cultural angle, Hallam’s takedown of this blight upon account/brand/marketing planning is perfect.

Read it.

Share it.

Champion it.

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5. YOU GUYS, IT’S OK TO SKIP BREAKFAST

Really.

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Bonuses this week are as follows:

• The new Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 trailer is out (and looks great).
• My friend Matt filmed himself playing the new Resident Evil demo on PSVR. I lol’d.
• If you’ve got a 4K TV, you might find this YouTube playlist useful/interesting. Maybe.

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Other stuff:

I spoke at two things (actually, no – three things if you include a webinar) last week and there are write ups for both, here: Digiday and FutureBook. Much fun was had at both (thanks for having me, gang). This tweet re: something I said about bots I thought was v good. Speaking of which, I do love to chat about Roombot (oh yes, one other bot thing: we did an Ogilvy Webinar on it last week. Slides are here if you fancy them).

Overall, it has been a busy week. Next week though? That’s going to be a doozy.

And I’m done.

Night y’all.

Things of note for the week ending Friday November 25th, 2016.

1. HOLY HELL, LET’S GO TO MARS FOR THE SUMMER

Well, not yet. But soon.

This is the ‘EM Drive’ – or the ‘Impossible Drive’ – and it’s been floating around as a theoretical propulsion system for a couple of years now (I think I first read about it back in 2015). Actually, scratch that, apparently the idea of the EM Drive has been around for 15 years.

It transpires that people have been nay-saying it for years. Why? It fundamentally equates to propulsion without propellant. Impossible. Hence the name, I guess.

Anyway, the REALLY IMPORTANT AND EXCITING THING is that NASA paper on the EM Drive has been peer reviewed and published. And it shows that the impossible propulsion system works.

LOOK!

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2. ABOUT YOUR NEXT MACBOOK PRO

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past month or so you’d be forgiven for missing the new Macbook Pro announcements that basically said ‘Hey look, here’s a Macbook Pro with a touch bar that does emojis and shizzle’ – and it hasn’t really gone down that well.

E.g.: The Verge, famous for its Apple favour, ran this op-ed:

“Many of us have been talking our way around this issue for the past week without directly confronting it, so I feel like now’s as good a time to address it as any: Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops are not designed for professional use.”

Burn.

Where does that leave you if you want a new MBP? Ewan Spence, [one of a small handful of decent writers] at Forbes, has put together a decent argument on why Apple’s refurb marketplace is a proverbial goldmine for the 2016 Macbook Pro detractor.

If you’re looking to upgrade that heaving machine, read the above first.

Just in case.

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3. COLBERT & OLIVER

“As the two late-night comedians sat across from each other onstage at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center here on Saturday night, Stephen Colbert asked John Oliver why he had not yet been given a commitment for four more seasons. “There’s a clear road that you can put your foot out,” said Mr. Colbert, the host of “The Late Show” on CBS. Mr. Oliver, anchor of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” replied brightly but fatalistically: “The kind of road that ‘Thelma & Louise’ drove off.””

This meeting of satirical minds was booked long before the US Election result was announced and, if we’re honest about it, was probably setup to go ‘Well, thank God that’s over’ when it was indeed over. Alas, things didn’t exactly work out that way.

The New York Times has the write up.

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4. ZUCK THE POLITICIAN

‘Facebook is the most influential commercial enterprise ever created, with unparalleled power that is yet to be fully understood. Mark Zuckerberg himself is a multi-billionaire in charge of a network that has intricate personal data on 1.8 billion people and counting. How do you define the checks and balances that need to exist for this kind of entity?’

It’s a HELL of a question.

In light of the fake news scandal currently enveloping Facebook, where does the accountability lie, if at all?

The BBC has more.

This is going to be one to watch in 2017 and beyond…

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5. RORY ON LIFE

I work in the same building as Rory Sutherland. Sometimes I see him around. I often see him speak. Very occasionally we work on the same project together. And once I even gave him a lift to the station (two weeks after I passed my test and I’m pretty sure I stalled it about seventeen times while we attempted to discuss the merits of an Apple Watch vs a Pebble – oh how we lol’d).

If you’ve never had the pleasure of knowing Rory (what? why? start here), then let me tell you he likes to provoke. He throws together interesting data points and together creates a new one to make you think. To wit:

“Whenever I wish to scandalise people, I have a sentence which works every time: ‘I would prefer my daughters took up smoking than started cycling in London.’ If my daughters take up smoking and find it impossible to quit, there is a fairly high chance of a fairly bad outcome. They may die early and very unpleasantly. Perhaps at 58 rather than 85 years old. But if they take up smoking and resist the seductive lure of the bicycle, well at least they won’t die at 22 beneath the wheels of a truck. The first outcome is a disaster, the second is a catastrophe.”

This, is standard Rory.

Go read the full article, via WIRED.

Much fun.

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Bonuses this week are:

• Last week I mentioned that our bots thing launched (#3). We have a new blog to go with it. You can follow it here (one post and counting).
• There’s a new ‘Full Day of Music‘ playlist got finished. Volume Five this time. 8hrs of non-stop amazingness, from me, and my friend Sarah.
• I’m speaking at a bunch of things soon, digiday, futurebook, and something else the name of which I’ve forgotten. Useful to know if you like seeing my face in the flesh.
• Reclaim your life from tech.
• A place for…? This is cute. Have you seen any? Do you want to take part? More here. 

Nearly there…Thanks for the birthday wishes, you nutcases. Bonus bonus items are things that you sent me as a weird kind of internet-based birthday gift. Brilliant.

• Birthday Drake
• Cat Dump
• Cupcake

And I’m spent.

Bonus bonus bonus – I literally just finished reading this Aaron Eckhart interview.

It was great.

AND NOW WE ARE DONE.

YOU CAN CLOSE THE INTERNET NOW.

x

Things of note for the week ending Saturday November 19th, 2016

1. THE STATE OF MOBILE VR

The Google Daydream launched this month and while we’re nowhere near any kind of widespread consumer penetration on what Daydream is or does (I mean, it’s £69 Google – where’s your big Christmas push?) it’s still yet another stone in the foundations of a solid VR marketplace.

I’ve played with one and it’s alright: comfy to use, intuitive remote control, etc… but ostensibly it’s just a better Samsung Gear VR. Which in turn is a smarter Google Cardboard. And yet the one the thing they all have in common is that they all need a mobile phone to act as the main viewscreen. If you didn’t know already: we all have a VR screen in our pocket.

If all this is new to you (and even if it isn’t) and inline with the Daydream launch, Polygon has put together an excellent overview of the Mobile VR landscape, what it means, and what it looks like for the future.

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2. OBAMA CONSIDERS HIS LEGACY

I was up late last night reading this wonderful long read from The New Yorker. Covering time with President Obama in the days before and after the recent US election, this is yet another insight into what it takes to be the leader of the free world and, in reality, another example of how much we will lose after he’s gone.

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3. LAUNCHED A THING

See: ‘Ogilvy bets big on bots as messaging apps surge in popularity‘

By ‘launched a thing’, we mean ‘went public with an offering we’ve been working on since the summer’. There are three bots that we’ve built that we can talk about since then:

• Roombot – a bot for Ogilvy London. We have 85 meeting rooms across 13 floors at Sea Containers and they’re not named that intuitively. So therefore you could spend the first ten minutes of any meeting yelling ‘Where the hell is Voyage?’ or ‘What level is Cluster on?’. Roombot solves that.
• Stoptober Bot (now finished!) – a project for Public Health England to help people stop smoking. We’re looking at the data now and are hoping to publish the results later this month.
• Mondrian Assistant – our neighbours downstairs at Sea Containers, The Mondrian, have come with us on the journey and our open beta has just gone live. Right now you can browse the main areas of the Mondrian’s facilities and make reservations for drinks and/or dinner. We’re working up new features and will monitor/change/grow depending on user interaction. Again, more to follow.

We have a ton of other work in the pipeline and I’m really excited about the future. When I was given my new role of ‘Planning Partner – Innovation’ back in the summer, my boss gave me one simple four word brief ‘New stuff made useful’. This is the first project we’ve launched under that banner and so far the take up – of the teams internally and the clients themselves – has been fantastic.

Will Godfrey (my partner on this project) and I will be writing some more in-depth pieces on this for Ogilvy soon. Will link them in a future edition when they go live.

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4.  SPACED

VICE has a new and totally official oral history of SPACED with new interviews with some of the key players. If you spent ANY of your school/college/uni life watching this BRILLIANT show then you need to read this.

EXAMPLE:

Jessica Hynes (Daisy): I was living in my boyfriend’s squat at the time. Simon had a degree from Bristol University and could spell; I had an electric typewriter and some f****** Tipp-Ex. I’ve still got the very first thing that was ever put to paper for Spaced, which was a Marsha monologue – that was the very beginning.

OK?

OK.

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5. MY SON, THE PRINCE OF FASHION

“I took my son to Paris Fashion Week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants.”

I’ve had this story open in a tab to read for several weeks and finally got around to it this past week (due to being struck down by a colossal illness but that’s not for now). It is a beautiful read.

Please read it.

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Bonuses this week are as follows:

• Play this on your phone.
• Drivers vs Pedestrians, AI-edition.
• While I’ve been writing this week’s edition, I’ve had ‘The Undiscovered Peter Cook‘ playing in the background on iPlayer. Fan or not, go and watch it. Genuinely new things about him. Ach. I have been laughing – a lot.

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And finally, it’s my birthday on Monday.

Send me something nice.

THAAAANKS.

Whatley out.

Things of note for the week ending Sunday November 13th, 2016.

Many things to cover off this week. Seven, at a minimum.

Shall we?

THING ONE: THE LONDON NECROPOLIS RAILWAY

Ever hear about the train track for the dead? No? Allow me to enlighten you:

In operation from 1854 to 1941, the London Necropolis Railway was the spookiest, strangest train line in British history. It transported London’s dead south-west to Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, in Surrey, a cemetery that was built in tandem with the railway. At its peak, from 1894 to 1903, the train carried more than 2,000 bodies a year.

It also transported their families and friends. Guests could leave with their dearly departed at 11:40am, attend the burial, have a funeral party at one of the cemetery’s two train stations (complete with home-cooked ham sandwiches and fairy cakes), and then take the same train back, returning to London by 3:30pm.

Amazing.

And guess what else? The station still operates today (only with less dead people).

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THING TWO: FINNISH EDUCATION

This week in interesting education news, Finland is looking like the first country to completely abolish school subjects.

Look:

The head of the Department of Education in Helsinki, Marjo Kyllonen, explained the changes:

“There are schools that are teaching in the old-fashioned way which was of benefit in the beginning of the 1900s — but the needs are not the same, and we need something fit for the 21st century.“

Instead of individual subjects, students will study events and phenomena in an interdisciplinary format. For example, the Second World War will be examined from the perspective of history, geography, and math. And by taking the course ”Working in a Cafe,” students will absorb a whole body of knowledge about the English language, economics, and communication skills.

This I find thoroughly interesting. Especially as Finland’s education system is already considered to be one of the best in the world. Why rest on laurels?

Education. It’s important.

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THINGS THREE: BEAGLE 2

Remember Beagle 2?

The lost British Mars lander that failed to do, well, anything after attempting to land on our distant red cousin of a planet back in 2003? If you’ve been following the story you may even recall that ten years later, NASA spotted it on the surface and the little lander had finally been discovered.

Well, the work didn’t stop there. After studying NASA’s images, and recreating what they could see using 3D printers, it turns out Beagle 2 was much closer to success than we originally thought.

Really interesting reading.

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THING FOUR: CLOWNS

No image here. Just a link: the case for not being scared of clowns.

Related: my favourite clown-related joke ever.

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THING FIVE: STORIES OF USE

Work in social? Getting hassled by your clients to tell them / convince about Instagram stories [and why they should/shouldn’t partake]? Then you need this really useful help manual, from Instagram itself, that you should lift freely from and pretend your amazing overview deck is all your own work.

Go on, off you pop.

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THING SIX: SNAP SNAP

They’re heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeereeeeeee….

I said back in edition #194 that I thought the first hardware from Snap Inc., aka ‘Spectacles’, would be an interesting swerve for media creation and now, at last, they’re out for people to purchase. Alas, you can only purchase them in person and via Snap’s own travelling vending machine.

The Verge has a ton more on this (with a few good videos too), so you should go read that.

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THING SEVEN: SNAPCHAT / FACEBOOK FLASH

I’m not kidding. Facebook has made Snapchat. Like, actually and properly. WHAT.

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Bonuses this week are about the state of the world today:

• Jonathan Pie is an acquired taste at the best of times. This on ‘Trump: How and Why?’ is actually really good. Give it a watch.
• Azeem Azar’s always excellent Exponential View has a really good provocation this week re: Facebook’s role on the election. My favourite thing on this topic of Facebook’s ongoing mission to convince brands they can influence purchaser decisions through content / Facebook advertising is directly contradicted by its claim that they had no influence on the election result whatsoever (eloquently put in this tweet).
• My writing partner at Ogilvy, Marshall Manson, put these reflections together – they’re well worth a read.

Things of note for the week ending Friday November 4th, 2016.

1. WELL SAID, UNCLE MARTY

What am I referring to? This:

“Facebook can’t really claim that a three-second view when 50% of the time the sound is off is the same as a 15-second, a 30-second, a 60-second TV ad or someone reading a The Times for 40 minutes.”

Well, yes.

Quite.

Aside from the fact that the 50% is closer to 95% (and I’d argue the remaining 5% are the brand marketers playing it with the sound on to ensure that the voiceover artist they paid for actually sounds OK) Sir Martin Sorrell makes a good point. Furthermore, and to build on the chart I shared back in FToF #199 (item 4), I do think we’ll see YouTube begin to take the fight to Facebook in very real terms, when it comes to meaningful metrics regarding video consumption.

With the industry still smarting from Facebook’s recent admission/discovery of its own mis-handling of measurement (funny how these things happen when you mark your own homework) and advertisers slowly beginning to realise that Facebook isn’t everything – 2017 could be YouTube’s year (again).

There’s more to this one to come, I’m sure.

Just watch.

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2. CHOOSE LIFE

T2 Trainspotting. The trailer for this long-promised sequel to the seminal Danny Boyle slice of late 90s culture has been all over the web these past few days and, even though I don’t like to share stuff on FTOF that’s been overtly popular throughout the week leading up to publication, I couldn’t help it with this one.

I think this has the potential to be excellent. I really do.

1996 though? Where does the time go?

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3. NERD NERD NERD

Please find herein just the right amount of photographs to support the headline of ‘Britain’s Best New Train Stations: In Pictures‘.

Super geeky.

Strangely enjoyable.

Sidenote: image shown isn’t actually of a station. It’s a shopping centre above a station.

JUST SAYING.

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4. HUWS AT TEN

Huw Edwards is the news anchor for the BBC News at Ten.

This is not interesting.

What is interesting however is that someone noticed that Huw happens to strike the exact same pose at 10pm, every night.

Observe:

So of course there’s now a Twitter account dedicated to the damn thing and IT IS A THING OF BEAUTY.

Go see.

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5. DIGITAL TRANSITION AT THE WHITE HOUSE

Whatever happens at the upcoming US election there’s on thing that the incoming President will have to deal with, and that is the new and myriad digital and social channels that President Obama – aka @POTUS – will be leaving behind him.

“President Obama is the first “social media president”: the first to have @POTUS on Twitter, the first to go live on Facebook from the Oval Office, the first to answer questions from citizens on YouTube, the first to use a filter on Snapchat. Over the past eight years, the President, Vice President, First Lady, and the White House have used social media and technology to engage with people around the country and the world on the most important issues of our time (while having some fun along the way).”

Which is all fun and great and stuff but then, how on Earth do you handover the passwords? That’s not even the half of it. What about archiving? Or ensuring that the outgoing President’s contributions to the channels that he appeared on stay there?

How’s this?

“On Twitter, for example, the handle @POTUS will be made available to the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017. The account will retain its more than 11 million followers, but start with no tweets on the timeline. @POTUS44, a newly created handle maintained by NARA, will contain all of President Obama’s tweets and will be accessible to the public on Twitter as an archive of President Obama’s use of the account.”

This post, from The Whitehouse’s Deputy Chief Digital Officer, Kori Schulman, outlines exactly the processes that they’ve been working hard at creating for this unique handover of handles they find themselves in.

Good reading.

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Bonuses this week are as follows –

• 50 questions that’ll free your mind (not cheesy – genuinely quite good)
• The new Wonder Woman trailer is out and, irrespective of your opinion, this will do for girls and superheroes what 2016 Ghostbusters did for girls and halloween (or something like that – you know what I mean).  This is a GOOD THING.
• Do you think Cristiano is trying to tell us something? Lol.
  
• Anthony Hopkins is ace. If you’re watching Westworld rn (if not, why not? It’s AMAZING) then you’ll get a kick out of this; a decent dissection of one particular excellent scene from a recent episode. Worth watching.
• Apple doesn’t know who the new Mac is for (provocative).

Until next time, fam.

Whatley out x

PS. Found out this week I’m up for ‘social individual of the year‘ at the Social Buzz Awards (thanks you guys). Genuinely have no idea what I’ve done this year to deserve such a nomination so please, go and vote for someone who does.

x

Things of note for the week ending Friday October 28th, 2016.

TWO HUNDRED.

HONESTLY. TWO HUNDRED.

What started out as a 2011 round up and then a moleskine-based hobby to the mammoth newsletter it now is (hello subscribers!) has made it to its second century. Scha-mazing.

Enough navel-gazing for now though (mainly because as ever, I’m short on time and a) I want this to go out on time this week and b) the idea I had for an elaborate slow-motion gif of me popping party poppers in an endless circle of celebratory enjoyment got killed (and by killed, I mean I forgot to do it) and I’m annoyed about it) and onwards!

To the things!

1. ‘I GOT FAMOUS FOR LEAKING INFO FROM TOYS R US’

This article, from Kotaku, is a first person perspective of what it meant to be a super leaker back in the early noughties. Imagine a SUPER LIGHT version of ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster’ – it’s that, but for video game price leaks.

AND JUST AS COMPELLING.

Ahem:

In the 15 years I worked at Toys “R” Us, I sometimes leaked information about video game sales and posted them on message boards. I even took games home early to try them and then post impressions, which was very much against the rules. I did this because I’ve always been excited about video games and because, frankly, when your job is a grind, you will take chances if you know it’ll get your fellow gamers online to like you.

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2. MI MIX

So, this is bonkers. Introducing the new ‘concept’ near-bezel-less phone/phablet from Xiaomi, The Mi Mix.

According to The Verge (emphasis mine):

‘Nothing says sci-fi like a bezel-less screen, and Xiaomi’s newly announced Mi Mix Android phablet is very sci-fi with its 91.3 percent screen-to-body ratio. This 6.4-inch device has just been announced as a concept phone by the Chinese company, but weirdly enough, it has a price, Â¥3,499 ($516), and a release date of November 4th in its home country.’

Just. Wow.

Richard Lai has one and has been Tweeting the occasional photo with/of it.

With rumours afoot that the new iPhone will just be one sheer piece of glass, and the Mi Mix ‘concept’ (I mean come on, it’s actually going on sale; it’s clearly a test bed to gauge interest for future devices) out in a little under a week, we could be seeing the next evolution of mobile hardware design.

At last.

What do you think of the Mi Mix? Want one? I mean, I’d love to play with one. But I’m wedded to my Pixel now (I mean, come on, the photos are incred) and I can’t see me moving for some time…

Ps. If you have questions about the Pixel, shoot.

Pps. If you have one, you can now use IFTTT with the Google Assistant. Woop woop!

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3. INSTAGRAM: GOING LIVE

July 2016. Facebook earnings call. ‘We see a world that is video-first with video at the heart of all our apps and services’. Over the past month or so I’ve been presenting a work in progress of the Ogilvy trends document for next year. This statement from Facebook is on one of the charts. At this point in the presentation I take time to explain exactly what ‘all our apps and services’ means. In short: not just the Facebook platform.

Last week, screenshots of something called ‘Go Insta’ appeared.

Which, to me at least, means Instagram is testing Live Video in its Stories feature. Expect this to land within the next quarter. By the end of the year, at best. This, combined with Facebook actually launching a HUGE ad campaign specifically for its Live product further compounds just how much Facebook believes that LIVE is its future.

What social platform do you think of when you think of ‘live’? I’ll give you a clue, it’s blue and its logo is a bird.

Facebook is coming for the last piece of the puzzle.

One to watch.

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4. GO FOLLOW 100 WOMEN

No, not like that. Weirdo. I meant: on Twitter.

Here are 100 Women in Tech and Founders to Follow on Twitter.

What a great list!

Go on, off you pop.

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5. VINE DIED

Here’s a link to the news.

Here’s a link to my best vine (by loops).

Here’s a link to my best vine (by opinion).

A lot has been said (eg: this is pretty good). In fact, here’s a bunch of stuff I wrote on it earlier (I think the comments are being used for a trade and I’m probably being quite naughty publishing the whole thing here but hey, it’s Friday):

“Let’s get one thing out first: the shuttering of Vine is incredibly sad. Creators and businesses have been born on the service and many of those will now either pivot or find new platforms to produce/create upon.
 
For something that Twitter bought in 2012 for a rumoured $30m (mix of cash & preferred stock) and ultimately failed to monetise, it’s quite the costly mistake. Furthermore, the recent trade press about Twitter’s courting (and subsequent loss) of potential suitors for a sale have to be seen as a contributing factor to this closure. In short: Twitter is cutting costs and buttoning down for rocky roads ahead.
 
As the industry, the influencers and creators on the platform will move on (if they haven’t already – the rise of influential Snapchatters and Instagrammers of this world now far outweigh those on Vine) and brands and audiences will move with them.
 
Twitter will be flooded with ‘look at the amazing vines we’ll lose!’ cries right now. But in six months from now, who will remember? The interesting thing here is what’s next? Six months ago, I wrote that Twitter has changed and the industry should change with it. Twitter is still changing – it’s simplifying (something that arguably is long overdue). For example, now that Twitter has brought ‘Go Live’ into the main app – does this mean Periscope will be next?”
 
If it is, Twitter should move quickly. Facebook is stepping up its attempt of owning ‘LIVE’ and, combine this with the focus on one-to-one messaging with brands via Messenger, is encroaching on Twitter’s heartland once more.
 
In December last year, Ogilvy Digital Trends 2016 put forward a theory that Twitter’s place in the digital ecosystem could be eroded by its competitors. We didn’t want to be true then. We don’t want it to be true now. 

So yeah. In social media years, Vine lasted a lifetime.

But I guess, for now at least, its six seconds of fame will soon be over…

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Bonuses this week are:

• I didn’t just catch gastroenteritis in Cairo, I also gave a keynote on the three trends that are incoming for today’s consumer. The trends themselves are pretty work in progress but the finished article(s) should appear at the end of the year when Marshall and I publish our next edition of the Ogilvy Digital Trends deck. So look our for that. In the meantime, here’s a picture of me stood next to a chart.
• Do you use or are you considering using Snapchat for your business? Here is a REALLY QUITE BLOODY HANDY super guide to ‘Snapchat for Business‘ via Hubspot. Save. Add to bookmarks. Delicious. Whatever.
• Obama on AI.
• Occupants vs Pedestrians

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I’m not going to dick around. The only thing I should say, really, is: thank you, to all of you, that read this inane writing every week. The links are just stuff I find [interesting] and the growing list of subscribers, combined with the weekly emails, tweets, and general conversation starters that happen the week after, always make me smile.

So sincerely, thank you

Here’s to the next two hundred, I guess.

Whatley out.