Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #220

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:

Behind The Danger – Burners.Me. "I just came back from two weeks at Burning Man. While there, I got a pretty serious infection in my arm that needed medical treatment. So I learned all about Rampart, the emergency medical services on the Playa. They’re run by the Humboldt General Hospital and a team of volunteers. They’re amazing. And they work in insanely adverse conditions. I was hoping for a big write-up of how it works — I had a number of fascinating conversations with drivers, doctors, nurses, and others — but the best I could find is this post from a couple of years ago. They even have an X-Ray machine. Oh, and it’s all free to Playa attendees." (Alistair for Hugh).
Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Insidious Negative Effects – MIT Technology Review. "Common wisdom says, people share the best of their lives online, making others feel inadequate. Alain de Botton covered this in Status Anxiety, and the Internet has multiplied it a hundredfold. Facebook‘s research suggests that happy sentiment begets happy sentiment, and we know that angry comments on articles makes people dig in to their existing positions and ignore facts that don’t agree with them. Now an Italian study of 25,000 people finds that while online networking can have a positive effect, users of social networks have lower social trust of others. They conclude that ‘the overall effect of networking on individual welfare is significantly negative.’" (Alistair for Mitch).
On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces – Ben Fry. "This is pretty amazing: A (whole text) representation of the changes, over six editions, of Charles Darwin‘s Origin of the Species." (Hugh for Alistair).
Heavy Metal Umlaut – Jon Udell. "… Which reminds me of one of the great visualizations of the magic of Wikipedia, Jon Udell‘s Heavy Metal Umlaut (which I have probably shared here before, but it’s worth checking out again)." (Hugh for Mitch).
Battleship beast: colossal dinosaur skeleton found in southern Patagonia – The Guardian. "A new dinosaur. A massive one. We’re talking sixty tons (probably more). Wow. What we think we know about the universe, space… of our planet is probably quite limited. With all of this technology and all of this evolution, we’re still just the third rock from the sun, with a very short lifespan in the greater context of the universe. Discoveries like this give me hope for entrepreneurship. After all, if we’re able to keep on discovering these massive dinosaurs – that we never knew about before- and they’re right beneath our feet, just imagine what else we must be missing and what has yet to be discovered or created." (Mitch for Alistair).
The Star Wars George Lucas Doesn’t Want You To See – The Atlantic. "I remember seeing Star Wars in the movie theater. It changed my life. Even as the newer movie franchise hit the big screen, the opening scene would take me right back to my childhood. Like the smell of hamburgers on a barbeque. It turns out that George Lucas is very much the perfectionist. Over the years, he has been tweaking the original version of Star Wars, as the technology of CGI and sound effects improves. It’s been tweaked so many times, that the original version is nearly impossible to find. A group of rabid fans are desperately trying to piece together their own, original, version. It’s called ‘despecializing’ and they’re going at it. While that’s an interesting story unto itself, it got me thinking about the concept of ‘original’ in a digital world. If there is no physical version of a movie, TV show, book or magazine, how will anybody ever really know what the original version is? What has been changed and who is doing it? Take it one step further: what if price tags in stores become digital too (they will)… how will you ever know if you’re getting a good price versus the price that the store wants you, specifically, to pay at any given moment in time and geography?" (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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.