Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #74

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:

If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers – Study Hacks. "What makes the prodigious different from the merely talented? This Study Hacks piece looks at a study in Berlin that compared how music students practiced. It wasn’t so much how many hours a day they devoted to the work–rather, it was the intensity and focus of their study periods. As the study suggests, there’s a difference between hard work and hard-to-do work." (Alistair for Hugh).
11-Year Old Explains His Take On The Food System – Food Matters. "I spoke at an Ignite in Sebastopol last night. Events like Ignite, Pecha Kucha, and TEDx have revolutionized public speaking, acting as modern-day Toastmasters and making presenters out of people who might never have spoken up. Here’s eleven-year-old Birke Baehr at TEDx Asheville, denouncing Big Food." (Alistair for Mitch).
GE Filed 57,000-Page Tax Return, Paid No Taxes on $14 Billion in Profits – The Weekly Standard. "No comment." (Hugh for Alistair).
How the world is learning to speak in tweets – cnet. "A map of the languages of Twitter. I wonder: are we talking across these languages/cultures any more than we used to? That is: does Twitter mean we are more likely to engage with people/ideas/events from other places?" (Hugh for Mitch).
Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think – Wired. "I have always loved Amazon as a company and Jeff Bezos is one of the most inspiring business leaders out there. If you’re not impressed with their e-commerce business, you may be impressed by everything they have done with the Kindle brand (including the just-launched Kindle Fire). If you’re not impressed with their cloud-based business, perhaps you’re impressed by all of their acquisitions (like Zappos and beyond). In the end, they’re massive but they maintain a very healthy start-up attitude coupled with a deep understanding of analytics and data. This article highlights their genius… and it’s well-worth reading." (Mitch for Alistair).
The Public Library, Completely Reimagined – Mind/Shift. "I’ve been spending a lot of time with my family at the local public library. It’s an amazing institution that I don’t think I appreciated enough in my younger years. Books, magazines, newspapers, CDs, DVDs, toys, games, puzzles and even events. It makes you wonder why anybody would buy any of that content when you can get it for free? That all being said, my digital mind can’t help but wonder, ‘what a waste!’ If it were all digitized, we could not only save the space and the hard work or organizing all of this content, but you could also link all of the libraries together, share all of this content’… and my mind continues to wander. So, is there a point to having a physical library? Well, if the notion of a library is a public space that offers our citizens the ability to gain and share knowledge, then this article shows a very different… and fascinating path." (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.