Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #48

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, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so 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:

• The Destruction of Economic Facts – Bloomberg Businessweek. "Hernando De Soto argues pretty convincingly that because Western economies have ‘crossed the line from the rule-bound system of property rights… into an anarchic legal space, where arbitrary interests can trump facts and paper swirls out of control.’ Because of this, he says, we can never get to the bottom of an economic fallout — our only option is to keep propping it up. Yikes." (Alistair for Hugh).
• 1947 Mystery That Matters Now – The New York Times. "It seems like video games are finally getting their due. This week, Rockstar Games released L.A. Noire, a digital opus and an homage to film noir detective stories. What I find fascinating is how game reviews are slowly becoming indistinguishable from film reviews. Finally, video games are getting their due." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Edit This Page – Dave Winer. "I love reading old bits from the Web about the Web. Here’s Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS and one of the inventors of blogging and podcasting, writing in 1999 about his ideas for the kinds of simple publishing tools that make the world Robert Krulwich describes as ‘above possible’." (Hugh for Alistair).
• “There are some people who don’t wait.” Robert Krulwich on the future of journalism – Discover. "Robert Krulwich makes the best radio show in the world, Radiolab, with Jad Abumrad. Here is one of the most moving and inspirational piece you’ll ever read about what it means to be a journalist, and how exciting it is to be a journalist – especially a young one – today." (Hugh for Mitch).
• Do Facebook and Google Control Too Much Personal Information? – The Atlantic. "I recently Blogged about the social contract that people have when they sign up for an online social network (more on that here: The Other Side of Privacy). As we pump more and more of our lives into this channel (and into one or two, specifically), we have to understand (and be prepared) for what that means. Here’s an interesting and not-often-discussed result that we should all be thinking about. People are obviously concerned with how much personal information they’re forking over, but not enough to stop them from doing it – the benefits seem to be outweighing the divulging. These types of pieces make a strong case for data and avatar portability." (Mitch for Alistair).
• Breathing new life into books with official hashtags – Dare To Comment. "Can a Twitter hashtag build a community? The other day Seth Godin Blogged about this Blog post over at The Domino Project. It’s such a basic and smart idea that it’s somewhat shocking how few authors and publishers have tried it. The premise is simple: create a permanent hashtag for your book and promote it everywhere. This way, anyone starting to read your book at any given point in time can either work backwards to see what others have thought/discussed or they can jump right into the warm waters of a current conversation. Let’s face it, Twitter is much simpler to use for most than Blogging or building a forum, so this also helps authors and publishers by getting their ideas to spread through networks in a simple and effective manner. +1 Like." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it’s your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.