It’s awesome to see a site like Tumblr try and curate the hidden gems inside of their massive community. Looking forward to their daily posts. Visit Storyboard

“Storyboard is a regular collection of features highlighting talented creators and their work, as found within and around the massively diverse Tumblr community. (…)

If you’re interested in submitting a story or story idea to Storyboard, just create a Tumblr post with the #storyboard tag. Our editors will read them all — liking, replying, reblogging, or promoting the cool, creative, and compelling stuff. And if the story seems really good, we may ask to tell it here.”

Heidi Hackemer, former director of strategy at BBH, recently shared a presentation she gave for Sweden’s account planning group in Stockholm. My faith in strategy was restored after reading this incredibly honest and earnest story. Here are some things you will see if you read the deck below:

• The benefits of a path made by connecting dots vs. a linear path
• Advice on how to handle the delicate relationship between planners & creatives
• The dangers of the advertising “institution”
• Stories about wolves, road trips, and big trucks

Caine, the 9-year old boy in the video above, built an entire arcade out of empty boxes laying around his father’s spare auto parts shop. Filmmaker, Nirvan Mullick, stopped by the shop one day to buy a part for his car and became Caine’s first and only customer. Nirvan was so impressed by the arcade that he arranged for a flash mob to visit Caine’s arcade and decided to turn his story into a short film.

Stories like this make me feel good, because it shows that there are kids out there using their imagination and building things without the latest tech available. My favorite part is at 3:10 where Caine explains how he “verifies” a day pass at his arcade with calculators. You can read more about Caine, his arcade, and how the film helped raise $125,000 for his college tuition here.

If you ever wanted to know who’s behind all of the biggest hits on the radio, now’s your chance. John Seabrook does an excellent job illustrating how top 40 radio came about and how hits are made today. You can read an excerpt of the article below or read the full piece at The New Yorker.

“Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean. The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”

I recently spoke at SXSW Interactive about the evolution and future of online dating. My friend Robbie suggested that I reach out to futurist and filmaker, Jason Silva, to discuss the long term future of the online dating industry. Jason and I were able to connect via Skype, and we had an amazing conversation about people connecting with each other and the future in general. I used about two minutes of his interview in my presentation and I wanted to share it with you all. You can read more about my talk on the SXSW site.

Yung Jake is back after his last music video hit, Datamosh. His new experience raises the bar far beyond Arcade Fire’s HTML5 interactive concept. To see for yourself, just click e.m-bed.de/d/ to get started, then click any of the play buttons, turn up your speakers, sit back and enjoy the ride. FYI - You’ll get the best results if you’re using Google Chrome. For those feeling a little less adventurous or lacking Google Chrome, I uploaded a screen capture of the entire music video above for your viewing pleasure. Make sure to watch in HD and in full screen to engage with the concept properly.

Piotr Czerski’s manifesto, “We, the Web Kids,” is an amazing POV on how digital natives view the internet. It originally appeared in a Polish daily newspaper, and has been translated in to English. You can read the whole piece on BoingBoing.

“We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it.

If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.”

“What’s unique about this initiative is we’re not really wrapped up in having a big opening and a big debut in terms of ratings,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, told Co.Create this week. “It’s not differentially important to me that anyone watches this show at any certain time. People will be discovering this show for the first time over the next several years, the same way they’re discovering Mad Men for the first time on Netflix today.

It’s a strategy partly influenced by Firefly, the extremely popular Fox series that was canceled to the disappointment of audiences after just 11 episodes. Netflix executives have repeatedly referenced the show as an example of how viewership is fostered over time—some have even surmised that Netflix might even resurrect Firefly, as they have with Arrested Development.”

Netflix flips the script on TV shows by allowing them to gain a fan base over time rather than base popularity on pilot and episode ratings. Fast Company does a great job weighing out the pros and cons. You can read the entire post here.

“MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. There is no registration or enrollment process. MIT OpenCourseWare publishes the course materials that support the dynamic classroom interactions of an MIT education; it is not a degree-granting or credit-bearing initiative. However, you should work through the materials at your own pace, and in whatever manner you desire.” Visit MIT OCW here.

Tommy Jordan of North Carolina had a 15 year old daughter who decided to complain and criticize her parents on Facebook. Since she decided to publicly announce her grievances, Tommy decided to post an 8 minute video on YouTube refuting her points and then proceded to shoot away at her laptop with his .45. The video is now sitting on a nice 28 million views and the media is hungry for a story. Everyone from CBS to Good Morning America has approached and failed to convince Tommy Jordan to appear on their shows. Here’s his response to all media outlets:

“While we appreciate the interest you’re all putting forth to get in touch with us regarding the video, we’re not going to go on your talk show, not going to call in to your radio show, and not going to be in your TV miniseries. Some of you think I made an acceptable parenting decision, and others think I didn’t. However, I can’t think of any way myself or my daughter can respond to a media outlet that won’t be twisted out of context. The Dallas news TV news already showed that in their brief five-minute interview with the psychologist.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s nice to see that some people aren’t as eager to exploit their 15 minutes of fame. Kudos to Tommy Jordan. You can read Mashable’s full coverage here.