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Hello!

Welcome to a new edition of “On the Net Today”, the newsletter where every Friday we share a selection of useful and interesting resources to help you get the most out of the internet and make the best use of your browsing time.

This is our final issue of 2025 before we take a short break. We’ll be back in your inbox on Friday, January 9, 2026.

We want to thank you for reading and following us so attentively, and we wish you a very happy holiday season and all the best for the new year 2026!

Here are the topics we’ve prepared for today:

Each year at this time, the web analytics company Chartbeat offers a very interesting special feature in which it compiles the news and stories published throughout the year that have had the highest engagement among users. What is measured is "Engaged Time," understood as the total time users have been actively reading a particular piece of content.

To create this ranking, Chartbeat has analyzed more than 41 million pieces published by media outlets around the world that use its analytics services. 

The most engaging story of the year comes from Stephanie Giang-Paunon, Christina Shaw, and Lauryn Overhultz at Fox News for their reporting into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Gene Hackman and his wife’s deaths. The second most engaging story is The Atlantic’s The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans and the third is The New York Times’ She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges.

The Chartbeat team says when analyzing the list that “Coverage of high-profile deaths, like those of beloved actors Gene Hackman and Diane Keaton, drove massive readership, as did reporting on violent flashpoints like the Charlie Kirk shooting. Audiences also flocked to investigations into Trump-era national security lapses, clashes inside the GOP, and the expanding web of stories tied to Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein. At the same time, deeply human narratives, from families navigating health crises to communities upended by extreme weather, showed how personal vulnerability also shaped some of the year’s most resonant stories.”

BBC had the most entries on the list among the top 110.

These are the top ten on the list:

And here you can browse the complete special feature with the 110 stories with the highest accumulated reading time this year: 2025 Most Engaging Stories

Links:

Google Arts & Culture is publishing a cultural advent calendar during this month of December in which each day, until December 25th, it offers us a cultural surprise.

These were the surprises for the first three days:

We invite you to discover the rest.

You will find it by scrolling on the homepage Google Arts & Culture, a space offered by Google that houses a multitude of artistic and cultural creations and experiments.

It is well worth taking a look and enjoying the multimedia creations it contains.

Link: 

Today we recommend downloading a free guide published by the company HubSpot (basic registration data is required) in which more than 40 free and paid AI tools are analyzed and compared across numerous categories.

We found it to be a very valuable resource as it allows you to discover a long list of tools that can be very useful for any professional or business.

The tools are organized into five major groups: productivity, marketing, sales, creation, and AI assistants. For each of them, numerous specific categories are mentioned, each with its recommended paid tool and free tool.

For example, for the productivity tools group, there are categories such as learning, online meetings, or project management, among others. Or for the marketing tools group, there are categories such as analytics, content optimization, email marketing, keywords, SEO, social media management, or presentations, among others.

You can download the guide from the following link:

Email is one of the oldest and most essential tools on the internet. In 1971, a computer engineer developed, within the ARPANET project (the precursor network to the internet), a system that allowed messages to be sent between users of different computers connected to the same network.

This system introduced a key element that is still used today: the @ symbol, which was used to separate the user's name from the machine or domain name. The choice of this symbol was due to various reasons: although it was present on keyboards, it was rarely used; moreover, it clearly separated user and machine; and in English, the name of the symbol, "at," which means "at," fit its function perfectly.

A technology had been born that, years later, would move billions of messages daily and has become an essential element for personal and professional communication.

In last week's quiz, we asked about the meaning of Yahoo's acronym. The correct answer was "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"

I would like to recommend the AI image and video generation tool Runway, especially suited for creating animation and moving shots. Its ability to generate video from text or images allows for the construction of dynamic sequences, with smooth transitions and coherent visual language. It excels in smooth camera movements, cinematic-style shot changes, and animations with a strong aesthetic quality, making it a very interesting option for storytelling projects, marketing, and creative exploration. Additionally, Runway offers a free plan that allows users to explore some of its basic features at no initial cost, generate small video clips, and become familiar with the platform before opting for a more advanced subscription plan.

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That's all for today. See you in a week!