Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #99

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:

• Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century – PlaceShakers And NewsMakers. "Nathan Morris makes a good case that 60 years of suburban dreams have ended, and that we’ll no longer crave the suburbs. Technology, infrastructure, and lifestyle changes might turn the countryside into a ghost town the way the flight from urban cores has abandoned some cities." (Alistair for Hugh).
• Startups, this is how design works. "These days, it’s all about the interface. With dozens of new companies emerging daily, those that are easy and intuitive get a head start. Wells Riley has a great (and well-designed) guidebook for startups that need to understand the fundamentals of design. It’s a good read that illustrates common mistakes and underscores the fundamental reason for designing something: to solve a physical or virtual problem." (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don’t make sense anymore – Computer Zen. "I don’t know if you have this experience too, but I have a mother who asks me occasionally for help with her computer. She doesn’t do it very often because I usually end up shouting at the phone. For whatever reason, my mother just doesn’t seem to connect with the fundamental metaphors that computers are built on: file/folder structure, and layers of open-but-not-in-use applications. But what about the young people today, struggling to figure out why ‘save’ should be denoted by an icon of a floppy disk? What’s a floppy disk? Here’s a list of common computer iconography that no longer make much sense at all, since the things they refer to in order to help us ‘understand’ are – for many young people – long extinct and as baffling as the questions: ‘what app are you in? what does the menu bar say?’ are for my mother." (Hugh for Alistair).
• How Books Will Survive Amazon? – The New York Review of Books. "Jason Epstein is the cofounder of the New York Review of Books AND the co-founder of On Demand Books, which makes the Espresso Book Machine – an (industrial) photocopier-sized machine that’ll print and bind a one-off of your favorite book in about a minute. So he’s the co-founder of both one of the bastions of ‘old’ literary culture, and ‘new’ publishing technology. In this short piece, he tells everyone worried about the future of publishing to relax. The details don’t matter so much as Epstein’s conclusion: ‘Barring a nuclear disaster, life will go on as it always has: past, present, and future all at once.’" (Hugh for Mitch).
• Dieter Rams On Good Design As A Key Business Advantage – Fast Company’s Co.Design. "This is a beautiful speech given by Dieter Rams in New York in 1976. Rams is best-known for his design work at Braun (and for being a heavy influence on Jony Ive – Apple‘s superstar designer. Rams is 80 years old today, and this jump back in time is still an extremely fresh and compelling perspective on why design matters." (Mitch for Alistair).
• Prime-Time Stern – The New York Times. "On Monday night, the season premiere of America’s Got Talent will be on. Anyone who thinks that Howard Stern is a lewd and crude shock jock, will see the side of him that I know and love: he is, without question, one of the smartest people on the plant who commands a conversation like no other. His celebrity interviews are second-to-none because he is no-nonsense and has an acute beat on the human condition. America (and the rest of the world) are going to fall in love with Stern because in a world of fake reality television, he is truly real." (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.