Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #291

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:

Creating Fictional Data Services and Their Implications - Fabien Girardin – Medium. “Most modern apps are built atop data. That means the design and user interface depend a lot on what the data can do. One consequence of ‘big data’ that’s cheap and abundant, is that we can use the data to define the UX, rather than creating the UX first and populating it with precious data afterwards. As this variant on Amazon‘s ‘designing backwards’ illustrates, data-driven design fiction is an increasingly important tool in building products and understanding what consequences they’re likely to have.” (Alistair for Hugh).
BowieNet: how David Bowie’s ISP foresaw the future of the internet – The Guardian. “Two titans of British entertainment, Bowie and Rickman, will be missed for different reasons. It’s easy to remember Bowie’s gender-bent showmanship or side-trips to Labyrinth and Extras. But boy, could he think: about art, culture, the racial makeup of MTV, selling shares in yourself, and even the future of human interactions. Here’s a good example: Bowienet.” (Alistair for Mitch).
Splain It To Me – Status 451. “There has been a lot of discussion recently in my networks about cultural problems around ‘mansplaining,’ dismissals of certain points of view, largely by men in tech of women in tech. Alice Maz has written a good ’help document’ for both sides of this debate, which sometimes gets very bitter very quickly. She talks about different cultures of discussion, and how misinterpretation of these different cultures can quickly lead to acrimony, even if both interlocutors may have started out in good faith. As one person in my Twitter stream wrote: ’Everyone who works with nerds should probably read this.’ Similarly, everyone who is a ’nerd’ should probably read it too.” (Hugh for Alistair).
Mesmerizing Amish Barn Raising Time-Lapse Captures the Incredible Power of Team Work – Peta Pixel. “Amazing stop motion video of an Amish barn-raising.” (Hugh for Mitch).
Scientists struggle to stay grounded after possible gravitational wave signal – The Guardian. “Ouch! My brain is all achey. Just when you think you understand things… or that you can read complex things slowly, and then try to figure it out, the world gets turned upside down. So, here’s the short of it: gravitational waves may have been discovered. What does that mean? How open this: somebody may have opened up a new window on the universe. Mind. Blown.” (Mitch for Alistair).
Punctuation only in literary works – Flowing Data. “Think data visualization is cool? Check this out: what would it look like if you removed all of the words and just left the punctuation to look at from the world’s best literature? Would you have guessed art? It is a thing of beauty…” (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.