Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #301

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: 

• Conversational UI: a short reading list – Berg. “A few weeks ago I wrote a Medium post on chat as interface that sort of blew up. One of the best things about a widely-shared post, is the way you learn from the comments. And in this case, Dave King pointed me at some prescient writing from BERG in 2012 that should be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the next few years of human-machine interface.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Aphorist proves Twitter is the form’s perfect new home – BoingBoing. “An aphorism is a small, pithy truth, often exposing an inherent tension between two things. And Twitter may be its perfect medium: Short non-sequiturs from anywhere. And nobody is doing this better than Aaron Haspel.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Plants talk to each other using an Internet of fungus – BBC. “The symbiosis between plants and fugus networks is fascinating, but even more interesting is that different plants connected to the same fungus networks ‘communicate’ with each other, share nutrients, and in some cases can mount shared defences against intruding plants. But the best part of this article is the use of the term the ‘wood wide web’.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• State Of The Music Business: What The Numbers Tell Us – RIAA – Medium. “This is from the Chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, so it must be taken with a grain of salt, but it includes this astounding statistic: in 2015 vinyl sales (of 17 million units) grossed $416 million, while ad-supported streaming music (of billions of plays) generated $395 million. So, ‘dead’ vinyl is now more commercially valuable than all of the free streaming services out there.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• We’re More Honest With Our Phones Than With Our Doctors – The New York Times Magazine. “When we think of privacy and our data, many people are quick to worry about the myriad of social media spaces that are capturing our every mood, post, update and the pictures of our kids. What about search? What about buying online? Think about the things you tell the search engines. Think about the things that you look for at online stores. Pretty scary. The meta data tells the truth: we’re more honest with our phones than we are with our doctors. What? It’s true. It’s sad. It’s true. We probably tell a search engine things that we have yet to share with our spouses or close family members.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Careful What You Ask For Because This Guy Is A Photoshop Troll Master – Design For Trust. “Beyond the fact that this one of the funnier things that I saw online this week, I’ve become deeply fascinated with the fact that things like hacking, bots and now, trolling, have become something positive and… even… funny. A part of the popular culture. Nothing more to say, other than enjoy the laugh and consider the fact that some trolls are the best of things… and not the worst of them.” (Mitch for Hugh).

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