Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #237

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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:

  • Typeset In The Future – Alien:I’m a hardass about fonts. But this puts me to shame. It’s a detailed look at the fonts of Alien, and design in general, and how much the things in the background you don’t really consider — color schemes, labels — affect the overall feeling of the piece. Makes my unreasonable agitation at an extra space in the text of a menu seem almost normal. Almost.” (Alistair for Hugh).
  • The Rectangle Behind You – Medium. “I thought I took presentations seriously, too. But I don’t make them in HTML, and I haven’t given them with a Nintendo Powerglove. This guy has. Marcin Wichary created a series of posts about everything related to presenting… they’re amazing.” (Alistair for Mitch).
  • Apple iPhone Will Fail In A Late, Defensive Move: Matthew Lynn – Bloomberg. “As we’re all making our predictions for 2015, here is a prescient article from 2007 predicting the failure of the iPhone.” (Hugh for Alistair).
  • The Henry Ford of Books – Vanity FairJames Patterson is a publishing phenomenon like no other: he runs his book-writing enterprise (and an enterprise, it is) like a studio, producing multiple books a year. His writing (or rather, his books, since he rarely does the actual writing these days) isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you want to know what writing as a business looks like, Patterson is your man.” (Hugh for Mitch).
  • Google’s Philosopher – Pacific Standard. “What does it mean to be human? How will we define what artificial intelligence is? Sure, you have a definition in mind, but when something goes to court… like, say, your right to be forgotten from a search engine, you will quickly realize that our definitions of humanity need to be updated and redefined for where we’re at. Google actually has someone on staff, helping to create these definitions and roles. Sure, that’s cool (actually, it’s very cool), but do we really want a corporation (no matter how progressive) setting the fence posts on this sort of stuff?” (Mitch for Alistair).
  • The Best Brain Pickings Articles of the Year – Brain Pickings. “I could have cheated. I could have spent the next twenty weeks just pumping in one article from this amazing treasure trove, and you would be none the wiser. And, every week, all of us would click on the link and be astonished at the depth and quality of the content within it. Brain Pickings is my first destination (along with Seth Godin’s blog) each and every morning. This is one, big long journey of greatness. Pack a lunch. Enjoy.” (Mitch for Hugh).

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