Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #209

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:

Nick Ut on His ‘Napalm Girl’ Photograph, 42 Years Later: ‘Never in My Life Have I Seen What I Saw’ – People. "It’s one of the most harrowing, memorable, and iconic images of the twentieth century. It almost single-handedly turned the tide of public sentiment in Vietnam. But I never knew the story behind it, or what happened to its subject. Spoiler alert: she’s a goodwill ambassador in Canada. More details in the article." (Alistair for Hugh).
The Drax Files: World Makers [ Episode 18: Paradise Lost] – YouTube. "A friend of mine is half of a team making plays in virtual reality. His most recent work is a staging of Paradise Lost, put on in Second Life. They had to write a lot of the code themselves, and some of that code controls the audience, triggering where it looks and what it’s dressed as — in this case, changing them into angels and devils throughout the narrative. This brief video, part of a channel that showcases artists in Second Life, is pretty amazing. With the pace at which products like the Oculus Rift, (umm, Facebook) are advancing, five years from now this could be going mainstream." (Alistair for Mitch).
Disruption is a dumb buzzword. It’s also an important concept – Vox. "Point, counter-point. Timothy B. Lee isn’t convinced by Jill Lepore’s argument against disruption." (Hugh for Alistair).
The Disruption Machine – The New Yorker. "Jill Lepore, in The New Yorker, skewers the theory of the technology disruption, and particularly one of its most famous proponents, Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. That book – read by every aspiring start-up entrepreneur in the universe – promotes the theory that cheap new technologies brought to market by nimble little start-ups will usurp the big companies who can’t radically change course, because their existing businesses still make them too much money. Lepore isn’t convinced, and she has data to back her up. She takes Christensen to task for cherry picking examples, and trumpeting the short and fleeting success of small disrupters over big companies. It turns out, that many of those nimble start-ups went out of business, while the big companies continued to dominate at the top of their industries. In short: the old, slow companies that were supposed to get eaten alive by quick-moving disrupters… usually outlast the disrupters." (Hugh for Mitch).
Retail In Real Time – Retale. "I can’t take my eyes off of it. Stare. Behold. Watch the numbers click up and up. This is consumerism at its finest (and most staggering). With data to support it, this is what a visualization of popular US consumer spending looks like. This is how and where the US spends its cash, and just how quickly the numbers grow. Go ahead, I dare you not to stare." (Mitch for Alistair).
In Search Of Meaningful – Seth Godin. "Putting aside that I’m a total Seth Godin fanboy, this is just a marvelous, witty and insightful piece about the media. As Seth does so well, he simply educates and reminds us all about what the true value of content is. It’s not about how far and wide our content reaches, it is about who it touches. As every media company tries to become the next BuzzFeed, this blog post is a great reminder of just how anemic and low-calorie most of the media is that we click on… and aspire to be." (Mitch for Hugh).