Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #280

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:

New font lets anyone learn Japanese – DramaFever. “Cool design idea: Japanese characters that include their Western pronunciation, making it easy for anyone to find the Western phonetics behind Japanese words. What’s happened to typography online is pretty fantastic.” (Alistair for Hugh).
On marketing’s terminal addiction to personal data fracking and bad guesswork – Doc Seals Weblog. “Since he co-wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls has been thinking about advertising. His notion of Vendor Relationship Management — the antidote to CRM, where customers give vendors permission to reach out when they’re in the market for something — was prescient, but somehow online advertising got in the way. His latest bon mot calls personalization ‘data fracking,’ and I think he’s got a point.” (Alistair for Mitch).
How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult – Vox. “How our crappy (car-based) urban/suburban planning makes it hard for adults to maintain friendships.” (Hugh for Alistair).
The Light-Beam Rider – The New York Times. “Relativity is still pretty strange (forget about quantum physics). To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity, read through Walter Isaacson‘s description of some of Einstein‘s thought experiments – it will all seem much clearer (though still weird).” (Hugh for Mitch).
Facebook, Twitter and the death of the link – Fortune. “Focus on what you do best and link to the rest. This was the general thinking around online publishing for a long time. It was meant to help newspapers keep their focus, while empowering their readers to explore the Web (and, hopefully, come back). In this fascinating riff, Mathew Ingram, argues that the idea of linking is dying. No one wants to go anywhere. They want to stay where they are. This could change everything we know about publishing. Again.” (Mitch for Alistair).
Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age – The New York Times. “Apparently, Harvard’s Law Library has the largest collection of every trial decision since colonial times. The problem, of course, is that it’s all stuck on a bunch of shelves is one geographic location. No more. ‘Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.’ Kill those scared cows, right?” (Mitch for Hugh).

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

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.