Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #189

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:

• Burnt: A heated hullabaloo over $4 toast – Edible San Francisco. "The always-quotable Alex Howard once told me that tax rates are simply the cost the rich are willing to pay to stop the poor rising up, or something like that. There’s a class war brewing in the Bay Area (and even Tom Perkins has agreed Kristallnacht might not have been the best choice of words). But whatever side of the burbclave fence you’re on, something’s got to give. And apparently, it’s toast–hipster, organic, toast for the one percent. On a recent NPR comedy show, the host remarked that he ‘hadn’t seen thin, scruffy men in hats this excited about toast since the great depression.’ That might make for good copy, but the story’s a bit deeper. Here, then, is a piece in defense of toast, suggesting that perhaps it isn’t the perfect lightning rod for income-inequality debaters." (Alistair for Hugh).
• Former FCC commissioner thinks it’s time to go nuclear on ISPs – BGR. "Decades ago, the US federal government gave carriers billions of dollars to build out broadband. The carriers pocketed the money, the US is still miles behind other countries in terms of access to fast bandwidth, and carriers want to treat traffic that makes them money differently from traffic from, say, Google or Facebook. Well, things are about to get worse. Earlier this month, the FCC‘s regulatory framework for forcing carriers to respect net neutrality was thrown out. The FCC still has a trick up its sleeve, though: reclassify Internet service providers as common carriers, the way they treat phone companies. This would have wide-reaching consequences for the fortunes of every ISP, and who makes money from communications. Watch this space." (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Three Leakers and What to Do About Them – The New York Review of Books. "One of the defining debates of our time will surely be: what to do about privacy now that (almost) all our communications, locations, buying habits, reading habits, watching habits, among other things, are trackable? These kinds of questions cut in many directions: what should states be able to know? What should states be able to conceal? What do journalists have a responsibility to expose? Not to mention, what all those private companies should  be allowed to do with our data  the Googles and Facebooks everyone frets about; the Visas and Mastercards no one seems to notice; and the ISPs and telcos on whose wires and towers our communications travel. In this age of data, spying and just-about complete capture (of private citizen information; of government secrets) three people  Snowden, Assange and Manning – have more or less given up their lives in exchange for bringing these questions front-and-center. And the conundrum, especially for the American government, is: what to do about them?"  (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Paratext’s the Thing – The Chronicle Of Higher Education. "Why the aside, the conversation, the Tweets and blog posts and Facebook comments are becoming more important than the things they are talking about." (Hugh for Mitch).
• Everything I need to know about management I learned from playing Dungeons and Dragons – Quartz. "I was at my parent’s house earlier this week. It is the house that I grew up in. On my journey to rediscover the electric bass, I was trying to find all of my old books from school on the subject. Of course, it was all just where I had left it. Right next to the stack of books, I discovered my original Dungeons & Dragons starter kit box. It included instruction manuals, adventures, the famous dice and even some characters I had developed. It transported me back in time to my early teens. I didn’t think I was a nerd (or I didn’t care), but I loved creating characters with friends and taking them on adventures. It was much more than a board game, it was much more than role-playing, and it was much more than something we did to kill time. I learned a lot from building these characters and these worlds. It’s quite possible, that I never realized just how much…" (Mitch for Alistair).
• What You’re Worth To Facebook – The New Yorker. "Facebook had a great week. Just look at their stock. Just look at how they’ve managed to embrace and run with mobile. Just look at the pending launch of stand-alone apps like, Paper. The question becomes this: is there any chance that Facebook can outdo Google at this point? The real promise of Google’s revenue from advertising is that they are able to put a message in front of people who are searching for something, in specific. Is it possible, that Facebook can take this a step further by putting messages in front of people that are hyper-relevant without those people even having to search for it? Facebook thinks so. Let’s see if they can pull it off and what this means to companies like Google and Yahoo." (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.