Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #103

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, 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:

The mystery of La Contessa – San Francisco Bay Guardian. "I’m on the West Coast this week, and seeing many of my Burner friends again for the first time in a while. As the summer kicks off, a certain kind of scruffy Bay Area hipster–what happens when goths meet dust–starts planning for their final summer fling, which happens just North of Reno. Burning Man is an amazing experience, like being a roadie in the middle of a week-long Cirque Du Soleil show. And it’s rife with drama and color. I just learned about the torching of La Contessa, a school bus-turned-Spanish-galleon embroiled in a murky (dusty?) lawsuit. Even the scandals of Black Rock City are weird and fraught with kinks, twist, and smoke." (Alistair for Hugh).
Secret History of Silicon Valley. "The other big event this summer is Startupfest, an annual conference on entrepreneurship run in Montreal. This year’s theme is Startups That Matter. I’m lucky enough to work with Phil Telio on the content, and we’ve got a number of speakers who were around when it all began, building things like DNS and the spreadsheet. Steve Blank, the Godfather of Eric Ries‘ Lean Startup movement, is a Berkley professor with a long understanding of the patterns that shaped Silicon Valley. In this hour-long (but fascinating and well worth it!) lecture at the Computer History Museum, he reminds us that the Valley wasn’t just silicon – DARPA, the CIA, and others fueled the tech boom with government funds. As NASA engineers watch their budgets shrink, replaced by private contracting, this is a sobering reminder of the role governments play in massive, unlikely undertakings that change the world, and in launching startups that matter." (Alistair for Mitch).
Mister Rogers Remixed – Garden of Your Mind – PBS Digital Studios. "Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind? You can grow ideas, in the garden of your mind." (Hugh for Alistair).
The Failures of the Facebook Generation in the Arab Spring – The Daily Beast. "Francis Fukayama (End of History) takes a look at the Arab Spring‘s rather tepid results in actually changing things. Along the way he looks at the history of popular uprisings, and notes (Quebec, listen up): ‘Students know how to demonstrate and riot, but they generally can’t organize their way out of a paper bag.’" (Hugh for Mitch).
What It’s Like To Be The CEO: Revelations and Reflections – On Startups. "This one of the most brutally honest pieces I have ever read about being an entrepreneur. The world sees deals like Instagram being bought by Facebook or leaders like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and think that it’s all smooth sailing, easy and that it happens fast. It ain’t. I’m in year ten of my agency, Twist Image, and it still feels like a startup and we’re still scrappy like it was being run out of our garage (even though it’s two offices now). From this post: ‘Very tough to sleep most nights of the week. Weekends don’t mean anything to you anymore. Closing a round of financing is not a relief. It means more people are depending on you to turn their investment into 20 times what they gave you. It’s very difficult to ‘turn it off’. But at the same time, television, movies and vacations become so boring to you when your company’s future might be sitting in your inbox or in the results of a new A/B test you decided to run.’ Yup… feels like just another day in paradise to me." (Mitch for Alistair).
Pixar story rules (one version) – The Pixar Touch. "Telling a great story is something all of us need to do a whole lot better, but it’s way more art than science. The people at Pixar know how to tell great stories. This short and snappy post has a ton of illuminating concepts in it. Some of them are obvious but mostly ignored by the masses. It’s a great reminder that in order to sell anything, we need to be able to tell a better and more unique story… and this has some great starting points." (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.