Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #56

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 Tau Manifesto – Michael Hartl. "Pi is wrong. Okay, not really; it’s just overcomplicated. Like saying ‘four halves’ when you could just say ‘two.’ At least, that’s what Michael Hartl claims. He argues that we should use 2 pi, or Tau, instead, and that many equations become cleaner and more elegant. He even has a song to prove it (which is strangely, hauntingly beautiful in its repetition without repetition). I missed Tau Day (6/28), but this is still worth reading." (Alistair for Hugh).
• Google’s War on Nonsense – The New York Times. "Content farms want to harvest the world’s information and display it as their own, hoping to gain traffic and visitors. That’s bad for Google, which tries to decide what content is best – but doesn’t want to be tricked into eating the empty calories of such farms. This New York Times piece looks at the arms race between content farmers and Google’s search engine teams, and Google’s latest weapon: an algorithm that can discern crap. Can automated book reviews be far off?" (Alistair for Mitch).
• The AAA bubble – The Financial Times. "If I read this frightening graph right, it shows that the last huge crash was caused by a giant bubble in Asset Backed Securities – the bonds that were made up of subprime mortgages. That bubble bursting caused all sorts of fallouts, but one result was that we decreased our investments in ABSs, and shifted investments over to Sovereign Debt (i.e. lending money to governments). But that’s basically just shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic, and it looks like that Sovereign Debt is likely to go bust as well (see: Greece, Italy?, Portugal?, Spain?… not to mention the USA). Fun times ahead." (Hugh for Alistair).
• Hats off to the winners of the inaugural Google Science Fair – The Official Google Blog. "All three of us have daughters. So, I suspect that all of us will smile at the news that the three winners of the Google Science Fair are girls." (Hugh for Mitch).
• The Start-Up of You – The New York Times. "This opinion piece by Thomas L. Friedman (author of The World Is Flat, etc…) in The New York Times inspired an entire Blog post for me this week (see: Perpetual Start-Up). I don’t think I realized that in a world where anyone can start their own business, it also means that the expectations of both employees and some of the biggest employers must change. Check out this line from Friedman’s article: ‘Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.’ It’s fun to look at new businesses like lean start-ups, etc… but we also have to think deeply about what it does to change the landscape of business, employment and everyday people." (Mitch for Alistair).
• The News Industry Debate – The Economist. "The Economist pulls together two of the world’s most interesting media thinkers (Jay Rosen and Nicholas Carr) to debate this question: Does the Internet make journalism better or worse? Not only is there some lively back and forth, but the comments are also hot and bothered. Couple that with the interactivity that this online exclusive offers, and you can also start to see how traditional publishers can take news items and make them more interesting online over print… even when it is just text." (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.