Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #144

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:

• We are all routers: a new empathetic internet and the orgasmic mediation that fuels it – The Verge. "Recovering from South By Southwest and the inevitable plague that follows it, I saw a lot of writing–but not much revolution. When tech goes mainstream, there’s no need for a showcase of the remarkable any more. When that happens, the conference gets sessions with titles like ‘Female Orgasm: The Regenerative Human Technology’, which is apparently what happens when Ray Kurzweil meets an aspiring Buddhist nun (no, I’m not making this up). And according to The Verge‘s Trent Wolbe, that session may not only have been one of the most interesting, it may even be a metaphor for the event itself." (Alistair for Hugh).
• Friday Night Fright Flicks – Blip.TV. "First, a warning: this contains foul language, it’s going to offend people, it’s puerile, sophomoric, and full of cheap laughs. I nearly didn’t include it in my links. You may be offended, and should probably skip the link. But I ultimately chose to include it, because it’s a really good example of the democratization of media. These short critical reviews are actually pretty good. Sometimes, they’re really clever. And they’re a great example of what can be done with a video camera, good DVD ripping software, and some spare time. I think this started with Mystery Science Theatre 3000 years ago, but that show was constrained by copyright and broadcast TV. Sprinkle a little Fair Use Doctrine and ubiquitous broadband, and you get this. Now imagine what it’s like to have to court critics like these when you’re a film publisher." (Alistair for Mitch).
• The “Indie” Journalists At the Center of the Bradley Manning Trial – Frontline. "Remember when every second story in the New York Times was sourced from Wikileaks? There were about two years there where you could hardly imagine how the NYTimes had anything to talk about before Wikileaks. One story the NYTimes has almost completely ignored though is the trial of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of uploading the trove of classified documents to Wikileaks. While the mainstream media – who feasted on the stories provided by Wikileaks – have turned a blind eye to Manning’s trial, a handful of indie journalists have kept a spotlight on the story." (Hugh for Alistair).
• Fact-checking at The New Yorker – An excerpt from The Art of Making Magazines – Columbia Journalism Review. "How things happen(ed) at the great The New Yorker." (Hugh for Mitch).
• China’s BGI To Sequence 2,2000 Geniuses In Search Of ‘Smart’ Genes – Singularity Hub. "There was a concern that the Asian system of education would be churning out way more smarter kids than the US. We would constantly hear these kind of stories in the mass media of North America. This notion that America must uphold its dominance in the world and that we should all fear these smart Asian kids who seems to care a whole lot more about the value of education and less about how someone is doing on their high school football team. Well, it has been decades and now these smart, Asian kids have graduated to become scientists who are now trying to produce these geniuses in a lab. Are you worried about a robot army? Are you worried about creating geniuses? Sure, we’re a long ways off from that, but the first step towards that is sequencing the genes to detect some kind of similarity. It looks like that going to start happening… now." (Mitch for Alistair).
• Would More People Use the Public Library If It Had a Water Slide? – The Atlantic. "You cold not make these types of headlines up. Strangely, this one is ripped from the headlines. Yes, in Poland, some architects/designers believe that people don’t read enough books because libraries are boring. How do we make libraries less boring? Why, build a waterpark in the building, of course." (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.