Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #243

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:

• The Travelling Troupe of Giant Marionnettes – Messy Nessy Chic. “This looks like something from Burning Man stepped onto the streets of France. Insanely large puppets, and demented makers, create amazing art on a scale that’s almost impossible to comprehend.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Future of the Keyboard Synthesizer – Contollorism. “Moldover is perhaps the most interesting person thinking about musical interfaces today. He’s designed mics and guitars as controllers; he recently posted this video about what some of the founders of Native Instruments are up to. For centuries, music has meant humans learning a new language and new muscle memories. Now, the computer can meet them part-way, with controllers like Ableton Push helping out — showing which notes belong in a scale, quantizing, and so on. Part of it feels like cheating, but cheating the way using Google is cheating on a library. This quick video shows what’s coming for tomorrow’s artists.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality – Quartz. “I’ve never really thought all that romantically about middlemen, but this article made me pause. Middlemen get a bad rap – they may provide some value, but in exchange, they squeeze the little guy, and raise prices on the consumer. One unsung virtue of traditional middlemen, though: little guys could aspire to be middle men. You work in a grocery store long enough, learn the business, open your own corner store, and build a better life. But, as the Uberization of the wold continues apace, that route to improvement of one’s lot in life starts evaporating – for certain people anyway. Uber – and its ilk, such as its grandpa Amazon - use technology to add huge efficiencies to the middle, which enables them to reduce the cost to consumer, and price out all the other little middlemen. So, instead of thousands of workers and hundreds of middles, we get thousands of workers and one in the middle. Gooberzon. And one thing is for sure: if you drive for Uber, there’s no way you’ll open your own little Uber one day. This is progress. This is innovation. It’s inexorable. So it goes.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• To all the young journalists asking for advice…. – Fusion. “And, if you’re in the business of, say, journalism… here’s what the Uberization of your profession looks like.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace. – The Washington Post. “I have a nerd-on for office space. I’ve got it bad. I actually enjoy spending time in office supply stores. Not kidding. I’ve spent time watching how office space has evolved over the years, with Silicon Valley being ground zero for innovation. Open spaces… ahh! So modern. So smart. So needed. Right? Then, I became friends with Susan Cain (best known for her groundbreaking work on introversion, Quiet). Susan has written about this, exact, topic. We’ve spoken about it. People need closed spaces. People don’t like the feeling of everyone being able to see them, hear them, etc… So, is the open concept good or bad for business?” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Watch Willie Nelson Tell the Story of His Legendary Guitar, Trigger – Rolling Stone. “I am breaking a personal rule this week. I save a lot of content and – for the most part – I usually get a sense for when a story is so juicy that I want to save it during the week, and share it here. In all of the years, I have never tweeted out or shared a link earlier in the week that I wanted to feature here. Well, this is my first. I was so taken by this piece (and the video that came with it), that I am – for the first time – sharing something here that I have already shared out on my social feeds. Don’t hate me. It’s worth it. So, if I didn’t have this whole preamble to write about, I would have probably just said this about the link above: sometimes, the instrument chooses you…” (Mitch for Hugh).

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