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:

• William Gibson Has No Idea How the Future Will See Us – Motherboard, “William Gibson is the original cyberpunk, writing big, sprawling novels about tomorrows that are already mostly here. He even coined the term ‘cyberspace.’ In this Vice interview, he talks about predicting the future, and how many of today’s inventions are so outlandish, they wouldn’t have worked in a science fiction story even a few years ago.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The “How Does Stephen Colbert Work?” Edition – Slate. “I was lucky enough to see The Colbert Report live a few years ago. It’s an amazing machine, and Colbert is an absolutely flawless performer. Here’s a good interview that looks behind the scenes at what it takes to put on his show, and how he gets into his unflappable character.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems – Newsweek. “Speaking of William Gibson, how about this: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and Julian Assange, Founder of Wikileaks get together and argue over the future of the Web, statelessness, freedom, and technology as an arm of American foreign policy. Here’s an excerpt from When Google Met Wikileaks (published by my friend, John Oakes, at O/R Books) where Assange gives his thoughts on the meeting, and the place of Google in the new Great Game, whatever it is.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed – Wired. “Oh, the humanity.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• YouTube sensations: How online celebrities get rich in an often-wacky world – CBC. “I was invited this week to appear on the CBC‘s The National to discuss how two videos went viral this week. Because I was travelling, I wound up PVRing the episode. After my segment (don’t blink, because you may have missed it!), they ran a even-more fascinating segment on how many YouTube celebrities are raking in millions of dollars. It would be easy to dismiss this as one of those, ‘you too can make millions of dollars on YouTube’ pipe-dream kinda pieces. Instead, it made me realize just how much the future of television looks like YouTube.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• How Andrew Carnegie Built the Architecture of American Literacy – CityLab. “We take the Internet for granted. Daily. I remember (…even typing that makes me feel old!) when if you needed to understand or study any topic, you went to a library. The quality of the information at the library was always dependant on the quality of the city that you lived in. Big cities, with big populations, had the better libraries. You know what this meant? Yup, in theory, the smarter and more educated people lived in major cities. Is there a lesson about how libraries were built and used to help educate America for us to ponder when it comes to the future of their institutions? I think so. This article is glorious. Even if you never stepped foot into a library. It’s an important read.” (Mitch for Hugh).

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