Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #165

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:

NSA: The Decision Problem – Edge. "I had the pleasure of meeting George Dyson a couple of weeks ago, and while I only spoke with him briefly, I heard him present and explain the tides of technical history. He is a careful, convincing researcher of the near past, and in doing so, of the probable future. So when I saw that he’d chimed in on recent NSA revelations, I thought it was worth a look. I wasn’t disappointed. ‘The ultimate goal of signals intelligence and analysis is to learn not only what is being said, and what is being done, but what is being thought.’" (Alistair for Hugh).
Snooping on your kids: Sometimes surveillance defeats the purpose – GigaOm. "Two very different pieces on spying, this week. Next up: Mathew Ingram is one of my favorite tech writers. He’s never better than when he looks beyond the news to its consequences. In this epic, four-part series, Mathew talks about how he’s snooped on his kids for nearly a decade–and what he’s learned. Part confessional, part cautionary tale, as Mathew says, ‘it was the interference with their development as fully functioning social human beings (whatever that means in an online context) that really gave me pause, and finally made me step back from all of my monitoring.’" (Alistair for Mitch).
How The Government Killed A Secure E-mail Company – The New Yorker. "When the Snowden affair broke, it occurred to me that there would be a huge new market for secure, encrypted Internet communication services; where users would pay for privacy. It turns out that the US government is pretty much making such services illegal. The government position is: let us spy on all your users communications, or you will go to jail. The scary thing about all this is that the companies and individuals who are trying to provide these services are not even allowed to talk about the legal threats they receive from the government: secret courts make secret orders. The contents of which must remain secret. Welcome to modern freedom, everybody." (Hugh for Alistair).
Out Loud: Everything Is Interesting – The New Yorker. "Mitch and I share an admiration for what might be the best article ever written about participation culture on the Web, Nicholson Baker‘s The Charms of Wikipedia. Here is a The New Yorker podcast interview with Baker about LCD screens, the craft of writing, the importance of slowness, cigars and many other things." (Hugh for Mitch).
Struggling Immigrant Artist Tied to $80 Million New York Fraud – The New York Times. "My cousin loves this online marketplace where he can pick any piece of art, choose the sign and someone – in some village in Asia – will paint it (by hand) for next to nothing. The results are impressive and it looks a whole lot better than a poster or print. I couldn’t stop thinking about this story. Imagine this: taking a hot and breaking artists and then convince someone to paint original work that is similar and then position it as an original. It scary. Scary smart. Until you’re caught. Then, not so good. (Mitch for Alistair).
Reshaping New York – The New York Times. "If you want to make online publishing interesting, you have to do something with it that you can’t do in other formats. The traditional copy and paste of content to the Web has been an example of what not to do. Still, it’s mostly all that we’ve got. This is a fascinating piece. Not just for the breathtaking changes that New York has gone through in the past decade, but because of how this is all presented. It’s inspiring. Still, it feels like we’re at the very nascent stages of what digital publishing is… and what will soon be able to do." (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.