Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #93

93Is 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 Reddit Cost Me My License Plate – BuzzFeed. "Want a great example of the end of privacy? Try this. Get a meme-worthy license plate, then drive it around a city full of hipsters prone to over-sharing. See how long you last." (Alistair for Hugh).
China: Crowdsourced Tax Enforcement – Bunnie Studios. "China has a distributed population, with a hugely varied lifestyle – inland farmers, coastal engineers, and everything in between. How do you fight corruption and keep taxation simple? Turns out game theory works well: they create a second currency for tax transactions, then make that currency valuable by turning it into lottery tickets. A brilliant hack on a massive scale, it smacks of the kinds of mechanics that make a modern startup go viral." (Alistair for Mitch).
Playboy Interview: Steven Jobs (1985) "Interview with Steve Jobs, 1985." (Hugh for Alistair).
The Google We Lost – Andrew Badr. "Andrew Badr takes a dim view of Google‘s recent major push away from its strength (data), and towards something it doesn’t seem very good at (social)." (Hugh for Mitch).
Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them – The New York Times. "How often do you learn about someone in your space that you never heard of (but should have), who is doing something truly spectacular (to the point where you wonder if it’s even a business)? This is one of those articles. It’s not just about big data… it’s about facts. What would the world be like if we had a Google that was filled only with facts? I’ve often said that the news is less about facts and much more about opinions. The social web is also a place where opinions trumps facts and it’s hard to tell fact from fiction. This is one of the more fascinating projects I’ve seen in a long time." (Mitch for Alistair).
Clay Shirky on Internet Issues Facing Newspapers – The Berkman Center. "I had the pleasure of having dinner with Clay Shirky at this year’s TED conference. Sadly, we didn’t really get a chance to chat that much. We were at a private dinner with ten people, but we were seated at opposite ends (it was probably done to balance out the baldness!). Still, Shirky makes my brain melt. He’s just that smart. I’m a massive fan of both of his business books (Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus). I’m not sure how this video from 2009 came across my desk, but it’s mesmerizing to watch Shirky dissect both what digital media has brought and how painfully slow traditional media has been to catch up. The content is just as relevant today as it was ground-breaking in 2009. So much has changed, and yet it’s three years later and this thinking is as fresh as can be." (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.