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The main way it’s different from This American Life is that instead of bringing you a different theme each week, every episode of Serial will bring you back not just to the same theme but to the same story, to bring you the next chapter. We’re starting with a crime story, that’ll run for about a dozen episodes. Our hope is that it’ll play like a great HBO or Netflix series, where you get caught up with the characters and the thing unfolds week after week, but with a true story, and no pictures. Like House of Cards, but you can enjoy it while you’re driving.

I actually don’t remember the day I started this blog—it was June or July somethingth 2004- so I’ve arbitrarily decided today will henceforth be The Beat’s anniversary. Ten long years of late nights, sleeping five hours, web crashes, Vietnamese Instant Coffee, Amon Tobin, Luke Vibert, Vitalic, Tipsy, Mahler, Stravinsky and Amy Winehouse. Ten years of stopping whatever else I was doing at some point to say “I gotta do The Beat now.” Ten years of watching the graphic novel industry grow, 10 years of a new golden age of comics, the rise and fall of manga, the rise and rise of comic book movies and TV shows, firings, hirings, 10 days that shook the world. Ten years of the internet changing every week or minute. When I began there was no Tumblr, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Youtube, no smart phones. People were so starved for entertainment that they actually read websites run by one person in their pajamas.

Truth Goggles is by no means the only annotation tool out there. There is Scrible, MarkUp.io (which says it will be relaunching), and a plethora of tools to help web designers, educators and others markup websites with notes and feedback. There’s also efforts like Hypothes.is, which aims to create a fact-based annotation layer for the web. Earlier this month, it received a grant of just over $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to “investigate the use of annotation in humanities and social science scholarship over a two year period.”

Schultz said his project is different in that it enables content creators like journalists to embed their own annotations on their work for all to see, and because it’s oriented to creating public annotations that are “about getting people to ask better questions and be more critical.”

During a January week in 2012, around 700,000 English-speaking Facebook users were chosen, without their knowledge or consent, to be emotional lab rats. The researchers found that if you tweak what people see in their Facebook news feed – the scrolling information on your page –to suppress or heighten certain emotive words, readers’ emotions will shift to match.

It’s not only emotions Facebook can nudge. It can make you vote, too. On the US presidential election day in 2010 it offered one group a graphic with a link to find nearby polling stations, along with a button that would let you announce that you’d voted, and the profile photos of six “friends” who had already done so. Users shown that page were 0.39% more likely to vote than those in the control group who hadn’t seen the link, button or photos.

The researchers reckoned they’d mobilised 60,000 voters and that the ripple effect caused 340,000 extra votes.

Yahoo’s decision to keep the show running now is the television business equivalent of trying to start a new political party by focusing on an issue with a tiny, but passionate constituency. Maybe the Yahoo “Community” will be great. But however wonderful it is, that success does not mean that Yahoo can produce good original television of its own, or that network television will take that success as a sign that it ought to find better ways of nurturing either high-concept television or kind comedy.

Treating the television industry like politics is an appealing idea, but a limited one. Networks can afford to have narrower brands, and in the present television environment, they actually have to — the days of big-tent broadcast are dead. You cannot turn Yahoo, Hulu, or Netflix into the tea party and hope the Big Four get the message.