Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #55

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:

• Effeminate Lumberjacks and Stuffed Turtles – The Good Men Project. "With my daughter nearly a year old, and my wife and I splitting time between work and home, I’m no stranger to late nights and the inanity of baby-talk. Nothing has quite captured the sense of the sleep-deprived, three-day-dirty-sweatpants haze that is the last year of my life like this article from Goodmenproject." (Alistair for Hugh, who will nod in agreement).
• Paranormality launches in the USA….and the Friday Puzzle! – Richard Wiseman Blog. "This is both a statement on the changes of publishing, and a rant. Richard Wiseman‘s book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There is a healthy dose of skepticism. The book has done well in the UK and elsewhere. But not so in the US: American publishers didn’t want to release it, largely because the American public likes to believe in things that aren’t real. Some publishers even recommended he re-write it to suggest that ghosts were real and psychic powers existed. What to do? Well, Wiseman’s publishing it digitally, with a Kindle version now available. It’s a great example of how today’s digital books pass yesterday’s pulp-and-paper gatekeepers. It also lets me dig on people who believe in unicorns." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Stephen Elop’s Nokia Adventure – Bloomberg BusinessWeek. "Sometimes it’s hard to fathom how quickly the world changes. It must be even harder if you are mobile phone giant, once totally dominant, now reeling from a new universe opened up by a computer-maker turned smartphone pioneer and a search engine company turned mobile OS producer. Canadians seem to be well-represented among the mobile-giants-in-freefall: RIM, maker of the BlackBerry is on the ropes. And charged with turning around the floundering Nokia is Stephen Elop – a Canadian and former Microsoft exec. The leaders of these companies have their hands full. It’s hard to imagine how either company will emerge victorious, but stranger things have happened." (Hugh for Alistair).
• A Tight-Knit Community – Slate. "With the impersonal scale of social networks like Facebook, it’s hard sometimes to remember the real power of the Web: connecting people who share passions, however obscure. Ravelry is a community of knitters, and probably one of the most successful online communities out there. It’s been around since 2007, and anyone interested in building community online should study how Ravelry has succeeded." (Hugh for Mitch).
• StumbleUpon Drives More U.S. Web Traffic Than Facebook – AdWeek. "There’s not much more to say about this article that that the jaw-dropping title doesn’t say. My first reaction to this article was, ‘what? really?’ But, as you dig in, you start to realize that while Facebook may have a lot of traffic, it’s looking more and more like a walled garden than a reflection of what drives traffic to other online destinations. That’s interesting in and of itself, but it starts to tell a new narrative: How ‘social’ is a platform like Facebook when it doesn’t help drive people to other destinations?" (Mitch for Alistair).
• You Are More Likely to Survive a Plane Crash than Click a Banner Ad – The Atlantic Wire. "I wrote a Blog post called, The Truth About Display Advertising (And Why Consumers Hate It), that I posted yesterday. Over on Facebook, Ethan Holland, pointed me to this news item from The Atlantic that really made me laugh out loud… and cry at the same time. Look at these stats: ‘you are 31.25 times more likely to win a prize in the Mega Millions than you are to click on a banner ad…. you are 87.8 times more likely to apply to Harvard and get in…112.50 times more likely to sign up for and complete NAVY SEAL training… 279.64 times more likely to climb Mount Everest… and 475.28 times more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad.’ I’m not sure how this data was captured, but if it’s true, we have another indictment on advertising industry." (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.