Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #50

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:

Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon – Wired UK. "I’m headed to Sebastopol next weekend for a tech event, and apparently they play this game all night long. In fact, we play Werewolf at Bitnorth too. It’s the perfect game – poker-meets-debating-meets-logic-puzzle. Or as science fiction writer and one-time player Andrew Plotkin says, ‘It was what poker would be if you didn’t play with a deck of cards, but bet solely on other people’s bets.’ This article explains the strange game of Werewolf, and tries to understand its even stranger appeal to the technoscenti." (Alistair for Hugh).
Mind Reading: The Researchers Who Analyzed All the Porn on the Internet – Healthland. "It’s been said that we’re never more honest than in our search bar. Well, since our every move on the Web leaves a digital breadcrumb trail, it’s no surprise that we can look deep into the human psyche laid bare. That’s what two researchers did for their new book, analyzing 400 million Internet porn searches. Spoiler alert: apparently, men like 60-second video clips and women prefer 250-page novels." (Alistair for Mitch).
Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster – Edge. "Given how much great stuff there is to read on the Web, it’s always humbling how little of it ever seems truly new or exciting. This article (a transcription of a talk by physicist Geoffrey West) felt like something new to me. He’s talking about research into cities, animals and companies, looking at the power laws that govern all of these systems as they scale. Fascinating." (Hugh for Alistair).
An Open Letter from Eugene Mirman to Time Warner Cable – The Greenpoint Gazette. "How many times have you wanted to write an email like this? This fellow did it. ‘I bet if Ayn Rand was still alive, she’d write a fun to read, but poorly argued book about how appalling and inefficient your company is.’" (Hugh for Mitch).
Filmmaker J. J. Abrams Is a Crowd Teaser – The New York Times Magazine. "Being creative is hard. This long feature really struck some chords in me. Being creative is even harder when you’ve been successful and when people want you to use specific media channels in way that may not line-up with modern society, but seem to make perfect sense to the traditional mass media channels that will do anything to make a cash register ring (and hold on to their past glories). It seems like J.J. Abrams is one person who can pull this all together… the fear (and this is me reading between the lines) is when the money and fame become the thing that holds the creative process back." (Mitch for Alistair).
Reporting live from the scene of breaking news…on an iPhone – Neiman Journalism Lab. "Journalism is changing and adapting… somebody better tell the majority of publishers, editors and journalists this. Check this out: ‘NPR has been experimenting with radio-quality live broadcasts on mobile devices and wireless connections… Smith used an iPhone app called Report-IT Live to make the connection. No IP addresses or ports to configure, just a user name and password. NPR worked with developer Tieline to streamline the app for maximum simplicity — not so much for reporters like Smith, but for tens of millions of broadcast-capable citizens out there.’ Sounds like a spin on Podcasting, but whatever it takes to push Journalism forward and to help journalists better understand this brave new world of publishing gets a thumb’s up from me." (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.

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.