Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #156

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:

• What is "derp"? The answer is technical – Noahpinion. "Derp is one of those words that started on the Internet, which is really just a giant meme-minting machine, after all. It defies definition–like modern art, you know it when you see it. Well, here’s a working explanation from Noah Smith, and it turns out it’s about Bayes’ Theorem." (Alistair for Hugh).
• How To Sell Coke To People Who Have Never Had A Sip – Planet Money. "Brand marketing hasn’t really changed, and venerated brands like Coke can usually coast on a market where everyone’s familiar with their ubiquitous red-and-white swirled logo. So finding a country that hasn’t had Coca-Cola is like finding a lost tribe, untainted by the modern world. This NPR story looks at bringing the soft drink back to Myanmar after a 60-year hiatus." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Chekhov’s gun – Wikipedia. "The Snowden revelations of massive spying on the American population (and indeed: on anyone who uses Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc) made me think of Chekhov’s law. If a gun is hanging on the wall in Act I, it better go off by the end of the play. And in real life: if you put all of your data on servers someone else controls, then you can bet that someone will be looking at it." (Hugh for Alistair).
• John le Carré Interview – CBC Books. "John le Carré‘s writing defined the cold-war spy novel: murky, morally ambiguous, and filled with rogues and fallen zealots. He’s always been a thoughtful writer, examining the stories those in power tell us, and the hazier reality of things. I wish this interview had taken place a couple of weeks later than it did, so that the former MI6 man could have commented on Edward Snowden and the leaks about NSA‘s surveillance programs. He discusses all of it anyway – reminding us that we knew this was happening all along." (Hugh for Mitch).
• Coding Is Coming To Every Industry You Can Think Of, Time To Start Learning It Now – Co.EXIST. "I have very young kids. When the conversation about language comes up, I’m always eager for my kids to be trilingual. I want my kids to to be learning English, French… and Code. The fact is that we’re building a brave new digital world right now. Not making our children literate in this new language of architecture, urban planning and infrastructure for the digital spaces is akin to not teaching them how to read and write. I’d argue that we all could do a better job of learning some of the basics of coding."
• How To Be Prolific: Guidelines For Getting It Done From Joss Whedon – Co.CREATE. "There has been a lot of talk about the whole quality over quantity debate when it comes to brands creating content (more on that here: Marketers Are Not Publishing Enough Content). The title of this article puts a wet blanket on the debate, if you ask me. If you want to get stuff done, if you want to get some great ideas to percolate to the top, you have to be prolific. You have to constantly be pushing yourself (and your content out there). This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a strategy. It just means that once you know why you’re doing something (and what you want out of it), you have to be prolific. And for the record, prolific doesn’t mean lots of crap. Powerful stuff." (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.