Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #100

93Is 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, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so 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:

How to Spot the Future – Wired. "On their 20th anniversary, Wired is spending a bunch of time with people who’ve shaped the face of technology. In this piece, they look at the seven lenses through which they try to guess the future. Several of them were set out by Wired’s first editor at large, the extraordinary Kevin Kelly (whose Next five thousand days of the Internet is brilliant, and makes us realize how nascent this world in which we surf really is). They still hold true today, and author Thomas Goetz gives them a great update." (Alistair for Hugh).
The frequent fliers who flew too much – Los Angeles Times. "Oh, how times change. American Airlines once offered an unlimited, lifetime first class seat for a paltry half-million or so. Turns out that’s not a great bargain when a fervent few decide they prefer life in the air to life on the ground. Faced with bankruptcy–and realizing this deal costs the company a million or more a year–American decided to try and shut them down. A fascinating look at what happens when promotions have unintended consequences." (Alistair for Mitch).
World’s Subways Converging on Ideal Form – Wired. "You would think that the subway systems in the world would end up with different geometries, since they exist in very different cities, with different geographies, different planning approaches, different cultures. But it turns out that subway systems tend organically towards certain characteristics: 50% of stations are outside of the core; the distance from a city’s center to its farthest subway terminus station is twice the diameter of the subway system’s core. These patterns and ratios appear again and again, suggesting that organization of urban systems follows set patterns, rather than set planning." (Hugh for Alistair).
How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – Gizmodo. "Perhaps a bit over the top in its anti-Yahoo slant, but this is a brilliant piece of anthropological history of the social web, and decline of one of the very first ‘social networks.’ When I first rediscovered the Web in 2004, it was WordPress, Wikipedia, Flickr and Delicious that revealed to me a new future… Both Flickr and Delicious were bought by Yahoo!, and both, it could be argued, became irrelevant soon after." (Hugh for Mitch).
Come the Revolution – The New York Times. "Several years ago, I read a feature in Fast Company magazine on the future of education. It made me stop and say to myself, ‘it’s true! Why can’t you buy your education like iTunes?’ Why not be able to take a marketing class at Stanford, a strategy course from Harvard and then a physics class from MIT all from the comforts of your computer?’ It seems to not only be logical, but a great new business model for education. Well, it turns out that others are starting to catch up. In this wonderful op-ed piece, Thomas L. Friedman is starting to feel it too. These new ‘revolutions’ are still nascent, but they are profound and powerful. Welcome to the iTunes-ization of every business." (Mitch for Alistair).
In Defense of the New York Public Library – The New York Review Of Books. "When I moved homes several years ago, the bane of the entire process was the packing, moving and unpacking of my book collection. As someone who reads about a book a week and a passionate believer in paying for all of that content, you can imagine the haul. When I first discovered e-readers and reading apps (thank you Amazon Kindle!), it – literally – changed my life. I carry a library worth of books with me in the palm of my hand at all times. I read more books than I ever have. Do I miss the feel and smell of books? Nope. I don’t. Do I love wandering through book stores and libraries? Absolutely. Is there a massive paradox and enigma in those statements. There sure is. What is the role of the library? Should it be just about books? Is that really a reason for people to go to them? Who knows?" (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it’s your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.