Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #53

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:

• Michele Bachmann’s Holy War – Rolling Stone. "The most eviscerating (and funniest) piece of political writing to come along in a while,. It’s filled with poisonous barbs and it became news in its own right. Some juicy samples: ‘[Her] brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions’, ‘trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo’ and ‘Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy.’ And that’s just the first few paragraphs. The irony, as Rolling Stone chief executioner Matt Taibbi points out, is that the more we laugh at Bachmann, the more she wins the votes of those who embrace willful ignorance and pave her road to the White House." (Alistair for Hugh).
• The First World Problems Rap – YouTube. "In addition to being a pretty funny video with a lot of truth to it, this is notable as a crowdsourced effort: the creators credit a subreddit with providing most of the lyrics. But mostly, it’s just a great video that hits too close to home. Being mildly troubled by songs that remind you how good you have it? First world problem." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Ciudad Juarez is all our futures. This is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad – The Guardian. "Moving from absurd to depressing, here’s a piece on Juarez, Mexico’s continuing decline into total chaos, with a warning for all of us." (Hugh for Alistair).
• Ted Wilson Reviews the World #91 – The Rumpus. "This just made me crack up. It encapsulates somehow the sea of often meaningless yet earnest opinion on the Web." (Hugh for Mitch).
• Secrets From Apple’s Genius Bar: Full Loyalty, No Negativity – Wall Street Journal. "Everybody who sells online thinks that they can be the next Amazon. Every retailer now looks to Apple as the gold standard for what a retail experience should be. Apple is still a relative newbie when it comes to retail experience, but they started with two core concepts that this article hardly mentions: 1. They needed to have a direct relationship with their customers. They knew if they left their success up to a bunch of random sales clerks in big box consumer electronics stores, they would be screwed. 2. They didn’t spend much time thinking about the revenue per square inch like most other retailers do. They were looking at what would be best for the consumer. I don’t know why retailers scratch their heads at the success of Apple’s retail ventures. The problem they solved is very simple: if a brand doesn’t have a direct and great relationship with the people who buy from them, then they are done for. I wish more retailers and brands would realize this." (Mitch for Alistair).
• When Is a Magazine Not a Magazine? – ClickZ. "My only regret with this piece is that it comes off as a little heavy-handed in the self-promotional department (the author works for the company they describe). Beyond that, it made me laugh as Hugh and I still lament the old, ‘what is a book?’ question. If everything published eventually winds up on an iPad (or tablet), does it all just become text at some point? Sure, it may be short (like a tweet or a news item) or medium-sized (like a newspaper feature or a magazine article) or even long form (a book, white paper, etc…). Will we define our content as text? What about as digital versions of the magazine integrate more multimedia tools like audio and video? Is it still a magazine? I find it particularly fascinating to think about this stuff simply because I’m amazed how one new media channel (the Web) is forcing us to define and redefine everything we know (or thought we knew) about every other kind of media." (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.