Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #140

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, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik) 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:

• Why Your Children’s Television Program Sucks: Max & Ruby – Deadspin. "I’ve been meaning to start a Tumblr on all the ways that kid’s books are wrong. I mean, why was the dragon in Paper Bag Princess able to burn down a castle–a castle!–and leave an untarnished, uncharred grocery bag for our heroine to hide her modesty? Yes, I know, I’m a curmudgeon. But I’d still been wanting to do it. Well, it turns out someone’s done the work for me when it comes to kid’s TV, and after a particularly insipid video graced our iPad, my wife pointed me at this. Let me be clear: It may offend some people and the video on the page is gruesome, so don’t watch it. That said, Drew Magary skewers kids’ programming perfectly. Admit it, you were thinking the same things." (Alistair for Hugh).
• Info for Businesses – No Spec. "This week, I ran a contest for a logo for the Lean Analytics book. I used 99 Designs, a tool for crowdsourcing ideas. I usually don’t rely on such tools unless I want to brainstorm something. I believe that a million bad designers have more good ideas than one good designer, but one good designer can out-refine them. Anyway, because of the way I designed the contest, it went a bit crazy–with 2,600 submissions from 634 designers, most of them spam, and many copying one another and yelling about it in the chat system. It was an interesting experience. When I tweeted the finalist in the hope of getting votes, Montreal designer AJ Kandy pointed me to this page. It’s a list of reasons why designers shouldn’t do work on spec, and it’s worth reading. It does give me pause, however. How do we strike a balance between creativity and crapweeding in a crowd-powered future? In the end, the whole experience was more about learning what a flat, connected, unfiltered world looks like–for better or for worse." (Alistair for Mitch)
• Chris Hadfield’s Twitter Feed. "This won’t be news to Alistair, or perhaps any of you, but surely this collection of tweets from space should be celebrated. Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield has been living aboard the International Space Station since December 19th. And, in addition to his other duties, he has been tweeting his observations, pictures and videos from space, and interacting with those of us on Planet Earth. He even had a Twitter exchange with Captain Kirk. This Twitter feed is an extraordinary document." (Hugh for Alistair).
• Coming Out of the Locker Room Ghetto – Huffington Post. "I meant to post this when it came out, but somehow it got lost in my link bucket. A few weeks ago, NBA hall-of-famer Kareem Abdul Jabar, who is currently a US Cultural Ambassador, wrote an article about race in the HBO show Girls. It was an odd juxtaposition, but resulted in all sorts of commentary on the Web. Here he responds to the commentary. He’s funny and gracious, and gently finger-wagging about the reaction to an ex-basketball player writing a cultural analysis of a 20-something white hipster girl show and its attempts to deal with race. Good stuff all around." (Hugh for Mitch). 
• Thomas Edison, Power-Napper: The Great Inventor on Sleep & Success – Brain Pickings. "There are two converging ideas here that, originally made me nervous but are starting to give me hope. I had heard a piece of data that said people who get less than six hours of sleep have a fifty percent increase in the chance of developing heart disease. I was never much of a big sleeper, but this data point wasn’t exactly sending me off into a deeper slumber. The other thing that happened is that I got an Up band from Jawbone. It’s like a Nike FuelBand but it does a whole lot more… like monitor your sleep. I was completely stressed out the first night I wore it. I figured I would wake up, plug it in and realize that I only get about three hours of sleep a night. I’m happy to report that my sleep is about average. In this instance, average for me is like super-achiever. I was never much of a nap person, either. I have this constant burn to get stuff done. Reading this piece made me realize that… yawn… zzzzzz." (Mitch for Alistair),
• 60% of Audiobooks Sold Are Now Digital – Galleycat. "This is one of those data points that makes you realize that an entire industry has changed in only a couple of years. And, in the same instance, you wonder why the number is so low? I guess people still listen to audiobooks on CD? I recently spent two full days in the studio recording the audiobook for CTRL ALT Delete. It was at this point that I realized I don’t even own a copy of the audiobook CD version of Six Pixels of Separation and that the audio version of CTRL ALT Delete will only be released in digital format. An entire industry that has been disrupted (and your iambik and Librivox platforms helped to forge this change), but very few people have even stopped to notice it or talk about it." (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.