Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #281

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:

‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves – The New York Times. “I blame Serial. And Radiolab. The New York Times calls it ‘NPR voice’ — and it’s showing up everywhere, with pauses and carefully rehearsed casualness. Since, years ago, Hugh convinced me to listen to Serial in the first place, I’m sending this his way: look what you’ve… done?” (Alistair for Hugh).
The GIF Bite Election – Matt Bors – Medium. “By most accounts, even conservative ones, Hillary Clinton‘s behavior during the interminable Benghazi hearings helped her, and hurt her opponents on both sides of the aisle. ’Theory: while Republicans were playing for the sound bite, Hillary was playing to the gif, perhaps the first politician in history to consciously do so.’ I agree.” (Alistair for Mitch).
Why I am worried about Twitter and why you should be too - Balder Bjarnason. “Twitter raised a storm of power-user annoyance recently when they changed the ’favorite star’ to a ‘like heart’. A bigger, more meaningful issue has been Twitter’s inability to adequately address problems of abuse, mainly against women and minorities. Friend Balder looks at these, and other red flags, and suggests Twitter is in real trouble.” (Hugh for Alistair).
Let Twitter Be Twitter – James Gleick. “Do I want to make two links about Twitter? Well, okay. Here’s a piece by James Gleick, writing about the joys of the arbitrary jumble that is Twitter, and why ‘fixing’ this jumble is doomed to fail.” (Hugh for Mitch).
How To Suck At Social Media: An Indispensable Guide For Businesses – Occam’s Razor. “You would think that my buddy (and Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google), Avinash Kaushik, should have published this massive post years ago. It was just published. You’re going to have a hard time reading this, because you will realize just how much so many brands are still struggling with social media. You will also recognize that most brands see social media as just another advertising channel. You will also ask yourself why you’re wasting all of that money on social media marketing, when you should be doing exactly what Avinash writes about in this post. And, if that were not enough, I’m comfortable naming this the post of the year. Because, yes, it is simply that great.” (Mitch for Alistair).
A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school. Here’s what he found. – The Washington Post. “Whether you have children or not, this is a very important read. We’re often asked to think about, speak about, and write about the future. The future of work isn’t about us. It’s about the next generation. Our kids. Your kids. We need to get to work when it comes to school and education. Don’t worry about robots taking your job. Don’t worry about cars driving themselves. Don’t about virtual reality being the next Web browser. Worry about the current state of education, and what we’re really doing keeping our kids locked inside this kind of system. Read this, and try not to be upset.” (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.