Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #293

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:

Read The Plaque. “So much of the Internet is cats and nonsense, we forget it’s a pretty good place to track and organize things. Here’s an example: someone set up a project to photograph and annotate plaques.” (Alistair for Hugh).
The Man Who Studies The Spread of Ignorance – BBC. “Even if you set aside race-to-the-bottom politics, social media in the modern world has helped polarize people, putting opinion ahead of scientific rigor. Turns out there’s a name for that (agnotology), and some pretty well-understood science.” (Alistair for Mitch).
How I Stumbled Upon The Internet’s Biggest Blind Spot – Nadia Eghbal – Medium. “As a maker of open source software, I can relate to this. Nadia Eghbal surveyed the landscape of non-VC-funded projects, sliced and diced them in different ways, and came up with a problem: many open source software projects, mainly dev tools, are fundamental to the functioning of the web. And, they are not particularly well-funded. This is a problem.” (Hugh for Alistair).
New Clues to How the Brain Maps Time – Quanta Magazine. “Humans are very good at keeping time, particularly well-trained humans, musicians, dancers, boxers. But brain scientists have had trouble figuring out how and where the brain keeps track of time. Recent research suggests that time is tracked by the same brain mechanisms used for tracking location. As we move towards wearables (and eventually, embeddables), this linkage between time and place will be woven into the apps and tools we build. Our cyborg future will be here. Soon.” (Hugh for Mitch).
David Byrne: ‘The internet will suck all creative content out of the world’ – The Guardian. “This piece is from 2013. It’s from a musician, artist and philosopher. Someone who I deeply respect, admire, listen to and read. So, now that we have streaming services as widely popular as the Web browser is, was he right? Is he off base? More importantly, does it even matter?. When the public votes with their wallets, that they would rather pay a minimal monthly subscription fee to access content, instead of paying for ownership, what is an artist to do? Is creative content dead or do we really have to re-imgaine these business models? I fear, it’s all about new business models… and they’re not looking all that lucrative for the artists… sadly.” (Mitch for Alistair).
The End of Twitter – The New Yorker. “This article is being tossed around a lot, since it was published yesterday. I usually shy away from pieces that are filling the feeds, but it’s an important read. Is this about leadership? Stock price? Executive changes? Product development? Or… have people simply decided that there is enough ‘other stuff’ that the value of Twitter is, simply and sadly, no longer there? Many people are saying that this can’t be the end of Twitter. Sadly, these same people are not the masses, who seem to find the platform too limiting, cryptic and – frankly – not all that interesting. I still love Twitter. Do 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.

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.