Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #231

Posted by

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:

  • A Free Dive In Japan – Roads & Kingdoms. “I was in Tokyo recently. Every time I visit the country I’m amazed. There really is no place like it on earth, combining formality and tradition with exuberance and a thirst for the new. In this great post by Roads & Kingdoms (who, it seems, can do no wrong in travel reporting) see where your Uni comes from. Spoiler alert: 60-year-old female divers.” (Alistair for Hugh).
  • Homo Conexus – MIT Technology Review. “Back in 2006, James Fallows penned an ode to Web 2.0. I’d used the term recently, and was surprised to find this piece. It describes a week of trying to live entirely online. This is pre-iPhone, pre-app store. And as he says, ’ .. the Dodgeball truth … comes at the moment when you realize that one of life’s possibilities – a product, an adventure, an offer, an idea – is really meant for people younger than you.’ Of course, by 2014 most of us have outlived Dodgeball, which Google shuttered in 2009. But this reads like an Internet time capsule.” (Alistair for Mitch).
  • House Republicans just passed a bill forbidding scientists from advising the EPA on their own research – Salon. “Sometimes I really don’t know what to say. The good news is that this bill isn’t likely to go anywhere with the current White House administration. The bad news? Yeah.” (Hugh for Alistair).
  • 26 Pictures Will Make You Re-Evaluate Your Entire Existence – BuzzFeed. “On the other hand, maybe our little quibbles about ’ cience’ don’t matter so much, when you factor in the size of the universe.” (Hugh for Mitch).
  • The Post-PC CEO: No Desk, No Desktop – The Wall Street Journal. “Way back during the dot com boom, I got sick and tired of my office. The stapler. The filing cabinets. Elastics. All of it. People protected their offices, desks and cubicles like they were their homes. I asked my boss if I could buy the cheapest and thinnest laptop. It was a Toshiba Portege. It was sleek. Not powerful, but sleek. My office became my laptop. Years later, my friend got a promotion at some big corporation. The benefit (beyond a slight bump in salary) was that they added an additional panel to his cubicle (making it a couple of feet longer). Within this organization, jealousy over cubicle size was a thing. Ick. I read this Wall Street Journal article and just nodded. This is the type of stuff I was waiting for since computers became portable. If I could write and create presentations on an iPad, I would probably drop my MacBook Air. The point is, that we live in the one screen world now. Most people don’t need much more than a tablet to get by. It seems obvious to state that, but it actually means that we are changing the way we physically work… and that’s pretty dramatic.” (Mitch for Alistair).
  • Craft A Spiritual Practice With Dani Shapiro – Good Life Project. “Over the years, I have become lucky enough to call people I respect, read, admire and follow a true ‘friend.’ Jonathan  Fields is one of those people, and I am very lucky. I was a huge fan of his Good Life Project long before we met. I was honored to be asked to be a guest on his show when I launched CTRL ALT Delete. Since then, I do my best to not miss any episodes. I guess I did. Somehow, this week, I was trolling through YouTube and came across this episode with Dani Shapiro. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the craft of writing, and what I can do to improve and grow. It’s a journey. Listening to this conversation touched my heart. Shapiro has written many books, but Still Writing is her book all about the craft of writing. I don’t know what happened here, but I fell madly, deeply in love with this conversation. Once it was done, I bought Still Writing, and I am loving it almost as much as Steven Pressfield‘s The War of Art. This conversation touched me deeply. If you write (or create any kind of content), you really do need to watch this.” (Mitch for Hugh).

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