Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• ‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves – The New York Times. “I blame Serial. And Radiolab. The New York Times calls it ‘NPR voice’ — and it’s showing up everywhere, with pauses and carefully rehearsed casualness. Since, years ago, Hugh convinced me to listen to Serial in the first place, I’m sending this his way: look what you’ve… done?” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The GIF Bite Election – Matt Bors – Medium. “By most accounts, even conservative ones, Hillary Clinton‘s behavior during the interminable Benghazi hearings helped her, and hurt her opponents on both sides of the aisle. ’Theory: while Republicans were playing for the sound bite, Hillary was playing to the gif, perhaps the first politician in history to consciously do so.’ I agree.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Why I am worried about Twitter and why you should be too - Balder Bjarnason. “Twitter raised a storm of power-user annoyance recently when they changed the ’favorite star’ to a ‘like heart’. A bigger, more meaningful issue has been Twitter’s inability to adequately address problems of abuse, mainly against women and minorities. Friend Balder looks at these, and other red flags, and suggests Twitter is in real trouble.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Let Twitter Be Twitter – James Gleick. “Do I want to make two links about Twitter? Well, okay. Here’s a piece by James Gleick, writing about the joys of the arbitrary jumble that is Twitter, and why ‘fixing’ this jumble is doomed to fail.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• How To Suck At Social Media: An Indispensable Guide For Businesses – Occam’s Razor. “You would think that my buddy (and Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google), Avinash Kaushik, should have published this massive post years ago. It was just published. You’re going to have a hard time reading this, because you will realize just how much so many brands are still struggling with social media. You will also recognize that most brands see social media as just another advertising channel. You will also ask yourself why you’re wasting all of that money on social media marketing, when you should be doing exactly what Avinash writes about in this post. And, if that were not enough, I’m comfortable naming this the post of the year. Because, yes, it is simply that great.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school. Here’s what he found. – The Washington Post. “Whether you have children or not, this is a very important read. We’re often asked to think about, speak about, and write about the future. The future of work isn’t about us. It’s about the next generation. Our kids. Your kids. We need to get to work when it comes to school and education. Don’t worry about robots taking your job. Don’t worry about cars driving themselves. Don’t about virtual reality being the next Web browser. Worry about the current state of education, and what we’re really doing keeping our kids locked inside this kind of system. Read this, and try not to be upset.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.