Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #149

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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:

  • Fake AP Stylebook – Twitter. "My first time mentioning a Twitter feed, I think. This account tweets Associated Press style guidance (and given that it’s topical, it recently pretended to get hacked.) Past gems include, ‘Avoid unfortunate typos: remember the lessons of The New York Times, whose ‘Valencrime’s Day’ message in 1985 resulted in mass looting and avoid using ‘husband’ or ‘wife’ in reference to same-sex married couples; instead use ‘roommates’ or ‘confirmed co-bachelors.’ A must for anyone working with the press." (Alistair for Hugh).
  • McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II – Wikipedia. "Sometimes Reddit‘s Today I Learned posts take me way too far down a rabbit hole. Here, I learned about the time someone collected enough points to buy a military fighter jet, only to be denied by a (surprisingly reasonable) legal decision. Also good lessons for marketers about how to handle disputes. I’ll just point you at the start of it and let you do the clicking." (Alistair for Mitch).
  • Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt – WikiLeaks. "Would you love to be a fly on the wall during the meeting between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Google CEO, Eric Schmidt?" (Hugh for Alistair).
  • Apex Predator – Popsci. "Sharks!" (Hugh for Mitch).
  • 20 Literary Facts To Impress Your Friends With – BuzzFeed. "My guess is that Alistair doesn’t need a cheat sheet like this for simpletons like me. Still, BuzzFeed proves – once again – that with a catchy headline and a clever idea (with a payoff to boot), you can learn quite a bit. This one really does have some gems and what it ultimately did was send me over to the Kindle store to stock up on some books that I should have read when I was much younger. Thankfully, it’s never too late." (Mitch for Alistair).
  • The Death of Deep Reading – Big Think. "My next book, CTRL ALT Delete, comes out on May 21st. As I was looking at the final hardcover version this week, I remembered that when I wrote my first book, Six Pixels of Separation, back in 2009, I was surprised that my editor wanted more headings and sub-headings throughout the book. I was fine with the content broken down by chapters, but I was told that people don’t read like that anymore. They need bolded headlines with catchy titles to keep their attention and push them forward towards the end of the book. My new book is chunked out the same way. We read in tweets. We read in spurts. We read in iPhone screen pages. Where is the depth? Is the depth gone? Does this spell the end of deep reading? I hope not." (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.

One comment

  1. ‘Writer’s Second Thoughts’ (The Financial Times) http://on.ft.com/164eQdu – The writers’ charity, English PEN, asked 50 authors to revisit their masterpieces and annotate them with their thoughts about their work. Authors including JK Rowling, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro all makes notes, drawings and doodles to provide a unique and fascinating insight into their thoughts, feelings and memories about their earlier creations.

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