Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #81

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:

• Uberdata: How prostitution and alcohol make Uber better – Uber. "On-demand car service Uber is all about the data. Sometimes, analyzing that data takes them into interesting places, largely because knowing where rides will be needed is key to making the system efficient. Know what’s a good predictor of demand? Sex, drugs, and robbery. Here’s why."  (Alistair for Hugh).
• My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too – GigaOm. "Om Malik is a powerhouse of content. He’s been watching tech bubbles expand and pop for decades, pumping out an average of three posts a day for the last ten years. I was lucky enough to work with Om and his team, writing on emerging tech and helping run Structure. Here, he looks back at what he’s been doing and some of the things he learned along the way." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Isaac Asimov weighs in with enduring insights on science, faith, and the future – i09. "The great science fiction writer (and, I just found out courtesy of Wikipedia, professor of biochemistry at Boston University) Isaac Asimov talks about the way of science, anti-inellectualism in American politics, and the decline of the US as a technological power. Interesting that this interview is from 1988, just prior to the explosion of Internet innovation. While there is much talk these days (again) of the American Empire in decline, we still have no challenger for that amazing and baffling cauldron of technological creativity that is the USA (Sidenote: if you don’t follow Maria Popova on Twitter/RSS, you should. If there were a Nobel Prize for Internet curation, she would have few rivals)." (Hugh for Alistair).
• A bibliophile in Paris – The Economist. "The crotchety, and generous old communist owner of famed Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Company – where travelling writers could sleep for no more than the price of a poem – died in December. I wonder, as more and more book shops disappear, whether a place like Shakespeare & Company will survive. Perhaps it is just the kind of place that *will* survive, while the big box book stores struggle." (Hugh for Mitch).
• Will streaming replace owning music? – The Globe And Mail. "At first, buying music on iTunes felt weird. It was like I was paying for something that I could not hold in my hands. It just didn’t make sense. For the past little while, I’ve ripping hundreds of CDs and dispensing of the physical objects because they take up too much space and I simply don’t use them. More recently, I was lucky enough to get a Spotify account. Now, I can’t – for the life of me – figure out a reason to buy music on iTunes when Spotify gives me – literally – everything under the moon when it comes to music. Why even bother storing anything on a hard drive when the cloud has it all? It amazes me that all of these very differing feelings about music (and content) have been shaped and re-shaped in a matter of two years. My, how time flies when technology flies faster." (Mitch for Alistair).
• Reading isn’t dead, but it’s changing – The Domino Project. "Seth Godin delivers a simple and smart perspective that we tend to forget about during the discourse on publishing, ebooks and the printed word: what about the reader? I often have to stop myself to realize that how I read has fundamentally changed since I’ve shifted to reading books on my iPhone exclusively. And it goes beyond that. Here’s what Seth says: ‘Publish what people choose to read (at a price they want to pay), and odds are, they will choose to read it. There’s plenty of room for leadership and art here, but little room for stubborn intransigence.’ Yup!" (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.