Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #79

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:

How a collapsing scientific hypothesis led to a lawsuit and arrest – Ars Technica. "Science and hubris are strange bedfellows. I loved this story, which reads like a nerdy Grisham novel, because it gives you a glimpse into what it’s like inside the pressure cooker of publishing and research. It’s also a strong argument for peer review and transparency in research." (Alistair for Hugh).
Passive Aggressive Notes. "Something lighter for the holidays. My grandfather seldom asked for tea, instead, he’d ask, ‘is the kettle broken?’ He’d have identified with the authors of this collection of passive-aggressive notes, signs and suggestions. Something to keep in mind when you open a present this year and say, ‘were all the regular stores closed?’" (Alistair for Mitch).
How Iceland survived the fire – Financial Times. "I am obsessed with our response to the financial crisis that started in 2008 and has no end in sight. It’s refreshing to see what Iceland did: banks who made stupid loans were told to suck it up and suffer the consequences. The Iceland government didn’t backstop the shitty financial decisions of big finance companies. The world was shocked! Appalled! Iceland would suffer. Except they haven’t. Iceland has done shockingly well, compared to Ireland, which took the opposite path: guaranteeing all manner of shitty financial decisions by their own banks and foreign banks, subjecting the country to years of woe. Of course, Iceland and Ireland are small economies, and small countries, but as laboratories for different kinds of responses to this crisis, they are instructive." (Hugh for Alistair).
You Say You Want a Devolution? – Vanity Fair. "This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, wondering about the reasons behind it: Today is 2011. Imagine 20 years ago, 1991: what was on the radio? How did people dress? Is there that much difference? Picture the same thing, between 1991 and the sideburns and bellbottoms of 1971. And then the sideburns and bellbottoms of 1971 versus the behives and swing jazz of 1951. It seems certain parts of our culture have stopped changing very much: music and fashion. What’s going on? I don’t quite agree with all of the author’s conclusions, but it’s fascinating, nonetheless." (Hugh for Mitch).
Can You Learn To Code In One Day? We Sent A Non-Nerd To Find Out – Fast Company. "I’ve been on a kick lately and it involves me (and my kids) learning another language. The language of code. I’m both fascinated with the idea of taking a stab at it and terrified because I don’t know where (or even how) to begin. Moving forward, I do think that ‘coders are the new creative,’ as Faris Yakob says. When I think about history, I think about all of the architects and designers it took to build our physical society, well the evolution of our society is, clearly, a digital one, so the coders, programmers and architects of our future need to know this one, very important, language… the language of code." (Mitch for Alistair).
Most print newspapers in the States have only a five-year life span – The Guardian. "This isn’t the ramblings of a lone Blogger hell-bent on building their own new media empire. This statement comes a soon-to-be-released report titled, Is America at a digital turning point?, by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg centre for the digital future. According to the report: ‘Circulation of print newspapers continues to plummet, and we believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium – the largest and the smallest.’ That – in and of itself – forces us to stop asking questions about when newspapers will go away and start doing the very hard work of trying to figure out what comes next and what we’re going to do about?" (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.