Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #276

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:

  • Haunted by data – Strata - Maciej Ceglowski. “The second half of that tale, Maciej Ceglowski told at Strata, which I helped run this week in New York. It asks: what if we stopped praising Big Data, and instead thought of it as nuclear waste? After all, it has a half-life that will outlive us; we don’t really know how to contain it; it’s an unavoidable by-product; and when it leaks, it’s really damaging. Why should we care? Well, remember that in the 1940s the Russians were our allies; 10 years later, being a Communist Sympathizer cost you your job. So, what happens when political winds change and our digital history can’t? Brilliant, and incredibly thoughtful. [As a sidenote, one of the reasons I love O’Reilly Media is that they put talks like this one — which call much of the Big Data hype little more than snake oil — on the main stage, rather than sweeping it under the rug].” (Alistair for Hugh). 
  • What Happens Next Will Amaze You – Idle Words. “This week I have two links to the same person’s content — Maciej Ceglowski, or @baconmeteor. The first is a talk about how botnets and ad-tech have given us a dystopian clickfraud arms-race, and in the process, undermined our privacy. He doesn’t pull punches: ‘We’d be better off if Apple bought every employee a fur coat and Bentley, or even just burned the money in a bonfire. At least that would create some jobs for money shovelers and security guards.’ It’s also funny, clever, and the first half of a cautionary tale. See above for the second half.” (Alistair for Mitch).
  • Building works – The Economist. “Cheap credit, excess capacity in the building sector, and sluggish economies. There’s never been a better time to put money into upgrading our crumbling infrastructure, but it’s a political hot potato that’s well out of fashion, at the moment. The free-marketeers at The Economist think we’re being stupid.” (Hugh for Alistair). 
  • NASA Discovers Liquid Salty Water Flowing On Mars – IFL Science. “Will we be thrilled or disappointed if we discover life on Mars in the form of microbes in seasonal, salty water?” (Hugh for Mitch).
  • The Future of the Internet Is Flow – The Wall Street Journal. “Is your mind ready to be blown? ‘The cybersphere of the future will resemble an electric power network, with information thundering through at tremendous volume and speed. Computers will become ‘step-down transformers’ to convert high-voltage information from the Internet into a useful, lower-voltage form. Flowing information will power your life. Today’s great cobweb will be replaced by a river of information flowing through time: the world telling its own story. Coming soon.’ Are you ready?” (Mitch for Alistair).
  • Reform Advertising – Jeff Jarvis. “We talk a lot about how the digital age has really changed journalism, book writing, publishing, how we read and more. My job is marketing. For years (make that almost two decades), I have argued (and still do) that we need to re-invent advertising for digital. The traditional revenue model of content delivered with advertising as the money engine must change for the Web. Banners ads got it all wrong. Now, it looks like things are coming to head. Famed journalist and media theorist, Jeff Jarvis, says it’s time to reform advertising. My only thought is: what took him so long to realize 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.