One of the best things about working in a company like Upstream Connections is spending all day on the internet. True, it’s not great for the eyes. To be honest, it’s probably not all that great for the soul either, but opportunities for entertainment are endless.

The obvious places are often the best. YouTube, for example, has brought us some real gems, my personal favourite being a sneezing baby panda. The site is great for marketing as well, if you can catch the zeitgeist.

For example, Tay Zonday became an unintentional internet legend for his impassioned call to power “Chocolate Rain”, which has had over 13 million views at the time of writing. Doctor Pepper saw the potential of young Tay and quickly signed him up for a marketing campaign. The result is “Cherry Chocolate Rain”, a great piece of viral marketing that has clocked up over 2.5 million views in a month. Whether it will make you want to drink Cherry Chocolate Doctor Pepper is another matter.

For those of us with a more cynical disposition, the comments section on YouTube also provides fantastic entertainment. Somehow, this humble and innocent video site has managed to plunge the bar of internet debate to an all time low. I really wanted to post an image here to illustrate my point, but honestly struggled to come up with anything that wasn’t far too offensive/biggoted/plain stupid - though XKCD author Randall Munroe hits the nail on the head rather nicely.

Away from the obvious sites, where you know distraction awaits, our beloved Google hides a wealth of entertainments.

One that particularly entertained us in the office on Friday afternoon was Google’s approach to nationalities.

Image searches for different nationalities bring up very different results. Switch off safesearch and have a go for yourself!

Searching for “German”, for example, brings up German flags, German Shepherds and German sausages. Searching for “English” brings up a sheepdog, some pictures of language classes and a few cartoons. Searching for “Brazilian”, on the other hand…