Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #18

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, Rednod, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for each other (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:

A Family Resemblance of Obsessions – Snarkmarket. "Matthew Ingram pointed me at Snarkmarket recently, and I felt dumb for not having been reading it sooner. It’s chock-full of long, chewy, thoughtful posts, and you may well already have seen it; but I’d be remiss in not pointing it out… A recent post looks at the nature of language, and points to author Tim Carmody‘s Bookfuturist Manifesto. Okay, by now I’m downright certain that this is one of those links I’d recommend over lunch and you’d nod at me politely, so as not to make me feel like a laggard. So thanks for that." (Alistair for Hugh).
The Value Every Business Needs to Create Now – Harvard Business Review. "Umair Haque is one of the best writers I’ve come across recently on creating new kinds of value. In this piece for the Harvard Business Review, he distinguishes between thick and thin value – thin value is a zero-sum game, while thick value adds something sustainable and meaningful. The piece is full of links worth checking out, and there’s a good video with more detail on the concept." (Alistair for Mitch).
Fractals – The Color of Infinity. "Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, died this past week. Here is Arthur C. Clark‘s documentary about fractals, and the Mandelbrot set, some of the most thrilling and significant mathematics of the past century." (Hugh for Alistair).
Bloomberg Game Changers: Steve Jobs. "Bloomberg TV‘s documentary on Steve Jobs." (Hugh for Mitch).
Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market – Technology Review. "Can Twitter predict the future? What if Twitter could not predict the future, but it could predict what will happen in the stock market… up to six days in advance. This doesn’t come as a shock/surprise to me. With all of this sentiment and input being put into 140 characters (or less) by millions and millions of people, the raw data is crunchable enough to pull trends and observations out of it. Take a read… and look into the future of data and trending." (Mitch for Alistair).
ABI: Five Billion Mobile Users Worldwide – MediaPost. "We are all very impressed with the fact that there are over two billion people on the Internet currently (and over 500 million of them are also on Facebook). If that stat drops your jaw, check this one out: ‘a new study by ABI Research today confirms that mobile subscriptions worldwide passed the 5 billion mark in the second quarter.’ Do you think that number is going to go up or down in the next little while? When we talk about Web and Mobile strategies, maybe we should really just be concentrating on mobile… and nothing else. It might sound dramatic, but mobile is double-plus the size of the online world… and that’s today." (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.