Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #91

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:

Forget Your Past – Timothy Allen. "This travelogue-cum-photo-gallery describes photographer Timothy Allen‘s remarkable visit to an abandoned Bulgarian communist monument. He slogged through hip-deep snow and braved low-lying clouds in a freezing ultralight to get a glimpse of a cold war monolith in Bulgaria. The story is nearly as amazing as the resulting pictures." (Alistair for Hugh).
What the media can learn from Facebook – The Guardian. "Jeff Jarvis skewers the traditional media’s disdain of social networks in this excellent Guardian piece. Rather than not valuing content, he argues, giants like Facebook and Google see content as something abundant, from which to learn and grow. When newspapers close their doors, they need look no further than this post to understand why." (Alistair for Mitch).
Working with the Chaos Monkey – Coding Horror. "Netflix keeps its systems on their toes by releasing a program called ‘The Chaos Monkey’ whose job it is to randomly kill instances and services within the Netflix architecture." (Hugh for Alistair).
I Like Words – Letters of Note. "Fabulous letter sent by a New York copywriter to everyone he could find an address for in Hollywood, when he was looking for a job as a screenwriter, circa 1934." (Hugh for Mitch).
We Don’t Need No Stinking Seal of Approval from the Blog Police – Gawker. "Do you think that the Bloggers of this world need a Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation? That’s what some Bloggers (who, for the most part, are really just traditional journalists who Blog as well) think, according to Gawker. Is this stuff for real? I think this Gawker piece does a great job of stating the obvious: the only Bloggers who need to better understand ethics are, usually, the ones who are scummy. Yes, it would not hurt if more people in our world took some basic media training, but the majority of the more well-known/established Bloggers seem to understand and know what makes for a compelling and ethical read… or am I way off base here?" (Mitch for Alistair).
Why Finish Books? The New York Review of Books. "When I read a book on my Kindle, there is usually a point of no return. At about the twenty percent mark, my mind goes into this strange state of, ‘I’m already in this deep, I may as well finish it!’ – even when the book is not all that good. There’s another point of view on this topic and it’s a simple line: ‘life is too short to read crappy books.’ So, what should you do? Should you finish a book that you’re not enjoying? Is there some kind of value in finishing a book that you’re not getting anything out of? Before you stop reading that book on your night table (you know, the one that has been sitting there for well over a year), you may want to read this article…" (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.