Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #80

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:

• DJ Earworm Mashup – United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom). "Missed 2011 in pop music? Fear not. This amazing five minute track shows mash-ups aren’t dead. Can you name all the tracks? Derivative or pure genius?" (Alistair for Hugh).
• Drunk History Christmas with Ryan Gosling, Jim Carrey and Eva Mendes – Funny or Die. "Give a man a half-bottle of scotch. Ask him to recite a Yuletide poem. Get famous actors to act out what he says. No matter what he says. Genius. Also breaks the fourth wall and some new ones." (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value – Forbes. "I am a convert to religion of Lean Startups. The principle tenet of Lean is: your job as a start-up entrepreneur is get to ‘product-market fit’… that is, build a product that your customers love, and are willing to pay for (with some kind of scarce resource, generally, time or money). You can restate this fundamental principal as: customer, customer, customer. Nothing else matters. This story is not about the Lean Startup approach, but rather about big corporate culture, and the primacy of Shareholder Value. That is: most CEOs have as their prime objective to deliver good returns to their shareholders, which leads to short-term thinking, and a focus, according to the author, on the wrong thing. The result has been a hollowing out of value in corporate America. I’m not sure if this is what ails our economy these days. But I do think that any company – big or small – that spends its time thinking about how to maximize customer value is most likely to become more valuable over time." (Hugh for Alistair).
• How Doctors Die – Zocalo Public Square. "We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about how we should live, but very little time thinking and talking about how we should die. And when it comes time, many family members insist we do ‘everything we can’… which often means, sticking the dying in the ICU, full of tubes and drugs and invasive surgeries in order to eek out a couple more days, weeks, months of life. Is ‘everything we can’ the same as ‘everything we should’?  Apparently, many doctors, who know the discomfort – and futility – of all that medical intervention, chose a simpler way to go. NOTE: I think I’ve passed on an article like this before in our six links exchange, but… well… these are important questions." (Hugh for Mitch).
• China’s deserted fake Disneyland – Reuters. "Beyond this being both eerie and creepy, I could not help but wonder: ‘would this have worked if it wasn’t a fake Disneyland?’" (Mitch for Alistair).
• Do the Classics Have a Future? – The New York Review of Books. "You are being warned: before clicking on this link, go to the bathroom first and grab a drink (you may want some alcohol in there). Choose a comfortable and quiet place… now, you can start reading this very long piece that will challenge you to not only define the word ‘classics’ but to think long and hard about what we learn, how we learn it and – most importantly – how do we integrate the classics into our daily media and literature diet? It’s easy to just fend this off as the role of elementary and secondary school English teachers, but it’s just not that simple. Personally, I struggle with the classics – both music and literature. I just can’t ‘get into it’… as the saying goes. As we become more deficient with long-form content from another time (thank you, Twitter and Facebook status updates), should we even care about our consumptions of the classics?" (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.