Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #321

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:

‘We Value Experience’: Can a Secret Society Becomes a Business? – Longreads. “I’m currently obsessed with treasure hunts, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs, not to be confused with Augmented Reality) and more. [As a sidenote, check out Elsa Maxwell, who as a young girl was told she’d never be invited to parties, and made it her business to create treasure and scavenger hunts for social elites in the early 1900s. She was so notorious the Waldorf Astoria gave her a free room whenever she wanted.] One of the more remarkable experiments in ARGs was The Jejune Institute, which also became a documentary. Its inventors created The Latitude Society as a subsequent game/experience, and tried to make it a sustainable business. But, can mystery and experience scale? Warning: This is a rathole to explore.” (Alistair for Hugh).
Emotive Modeller – An Emotive Form Design CAD Tool. “Shapes convey emotions. This MIT project tries to figure out how they’re linked, letting a designer use words like ’happy’ or ‘strong’ and generate physical objects that people associate with those emotions. Pretty cool for packaging designers; pretty creepy, too.” (Alistair for Mitch).
The Drone Presidency – The New York Review of Books. “Imagine, says David Cole wryly, how much drone killing will happen once we get a President who doesn’t think of him/herself as anti-war?” (Hugh for Alistair).
The Murky History of the Butterfly Stroke – The New Yorker. “I’m not a huge fan of the Olympics, and I’ve never been able to do the butterfly stroke, but I was fascinated to learn how that strange swimming technique might have come to be.” (Hugh for Mitch).
Acorn to Mighty Oak – Developing Material – Carney Magic. “This article was recently brought to my attention by the brilliant, Tom Webster. I know how much Alistar can appreciate the power of magic, performance and manipulation, so it’s a match! This wizard at sleight of hand reflects on what it takes to create, develop, nurture and perform new material. If you think this is just about how to make coins disappear, or figure out how to name the card your buddy chose, then the jokes on you. Want to create something new? Figure out how to tell a better story? Understand the skill of performance? Study magic and magicians.” (Mitch for Alistair).
Sex, lies and YouTube: The predatory side of internet fame – Mashable. “This should be mandatory reading for everyone. Youtubers think that they are above the law because they have a lot of subscribes, fans and followers. Fan girls will do anything to meet some of them. Some of these Youtubers are allowing them to do it and the results are… terrifying… ’Over the last few years, dozens have come forward to share stories of creators who have had inappropriate relationships with those who see them as bona fide celebrities. It’s become an open wound for Team Internet: the fact that the intimate interactions that define the community is also its darkest danger.'” (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.