Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention

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, Rednod, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, Bite-Sized Edits, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for each other (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:

A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education – Edutopia. "This piece looks at how school textbooks are purchased in the US, and how a strange combination of Gerrymandering, industry consolidation, and book budgets are letting fringe special interest groups redact American history. I came across it in my research into the coming collision of tablet computing, education, and teachers’ unions." (Alistair for Hugh).
Modernist Cuisine – Book Excerpt. "I’m a bit of a food nut, and I devoured (pun intended) books like Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. But now Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft has taken it to a new level entirely. His Modernist Cuisine is a five-volume compendium, a rethinking of L’Escoffier with modern science added in. They recently released this fascinating excerpt which shows the cutaways, high-speed photography, fiber optic cameras, and other techniques they used in the text. Of course, at $500 for the book, this 20-page PDF is probably the closest I’ll get." (Alistair for Mitch).
Roads Gone Wild – Wired.com. "I love this kind of story. It appeals to my innate sense that in modern civilization we often break things when we try to fix them. This is about the Dutch traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, who brings safety to the roads by removing all the signs. I’m not quite sure what the wider message is, but I like it." (Hugh for Alistair).
The Accidental News Explorer – Daylife. "Mitch and I are both newspaper and magazine junkies. We’re old-media maniacs wired for new media – and we’ve had hours – maybe days – of conversations about what a great news start-up would look like. We still don’t know, but every time a new and innovative take on news creation or consumption crosses my radar, I send it along to Mitch. Forthwith: The Accidental News Explorer app for the iPhone, which curates good content and throws in a dash of serendipity. I haven’t played with this app yet, but I expect Mitch and I will be arguing or complaining about it soon over lunch." (Hugh for Mitch).
Jurassic Web – Slate. "This is a very charming and terrifying piece. It’s one of those moments that make you realize, ‘wow, technology has really changed and can we even call this stuff technology anymore?’ The truth of the matter is that we weren’t really doing much of anything with the Web back in 1996… and doesn’t that feel like yesterday?" (Mitch for Alistair).
How Authors Really Make Money: The Rebirth of Seth Godin and Death of Traditional Publishing – Tim Ferriss. "If you think it’s hard to shut-up Hugh and I when we discuss newspapers and magazines, you don’t want to be around us when we talk book publishing. It’s probably annoying to people who are just sitting near-by. While I ranted about Seth Godin‘s recent announcement that he would no longer be publishing books in a traditional fashion (more on that here: You Are Not Seth Godin), Tim Ferriss (the best-selling business book author of The 4-Hour Work Week) wrote this killer (and long) blog post about how books are created and sold. Tim always brings sparks and sharp wit to his content, and this Blog post is no exception." (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.