Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #180

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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, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week 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:

  • Moldover’s Four Track – Documentary. "I first met Moldover at Foo Camp a few years ago, and he’s an amazingly creative guy. Some traditional musicians hold on to their analog instruments, bemoaning the saccharine of autotune; others dive so far into electronica that the result is almost unrecognizable as music. Moldover seems to have found the right balance. Watch this brief (4 minute) documentary and pay attention to the instruments and general hackery: when was the last time you saw a singer design their own mic?" (Alistair for Hugh).
  • The Infinite Jukebox. "While we’re on the subject of music technology, this one blew my mind. It’s the missing piece for computers to do remixes humans couldn’t possibly manage. Pick a song, or upload one (there are already plenty) and the software will figure out how to loop it endlessly. It shows fragments of a song that are similar, making it possible to jump around in a track without noticing the changes. I could play with this for hours." (Alistair for Mitch).
  • The great middle-class identity crisis – FT Magazine. "How we used to define ourselves by our professions, and how that is changing." (Hugh for Alistair).
  • The Hidden Technology That Makes Twitter Huge – Bloomberg BusinessWeek. "Paul Ford looks under the hood at Twitter, and finds all the metadata that is attached to every tweet you make. And why that’s so important." (Hugh for Mitch).
  • This I Believe: A Manifesto for a Magnificent Career – Occam’s Razor. "There is no hiding my love and admiration for my close friend, Avinash Kaushik. Over the years, I have probably quoted or been inspired by Kaushik’s thinking more than anyone else (he’s right up there with Seth Godin, Tom Peters and Clay Shirky in my mind). I have no idea what I did to deserve the honor of becoming friends with him, but I’m so thankful that he found his way into my life. Most people know Avinash as the analytics guy from Google (he was their former Analytics Evangelist). Avinash is still at Google, with an expanded role of Digital Marketing evangelist. He’s written two amazing (and bestselling) books (Web Analytics – An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0). He is a blogging behemoth. His posts are deep and long (some can be as long as 4000 words). He is as tactical as he is strategic. So, when he dug deep into what a great career looks like, this became the result. It was first published on November 11th, but I have read and re-read it countless times since then. When was the last time you could say that about a blog post?" (Mitch for Alistair).
  • Banning the Negative Book Review – The New York Times. "It doesn’t get more meta than this, when it comes to books. This is a very well-written (and funny) op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times by advertising pundit and author, Bob Garfield. Apparently, BuzzFeed‘s new book editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, will no longer publish hatchet job book reviews. There are so many layers to this story, that I don’t know where to begin. Let’s just say that this is a criticism piece about literary criticism and the end of literary criticism (which the writer is criticizing). You can follow this piece of yarn to figure out your own nuances and ironies in all of this. Decades ago, I wrote tons of record reviews. Personally, I never liked trashing a band’s work. It was a matter of two personal principles. Number one, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say it. Number two, if a reader is going to spend any time with you, why not turn them on to something they will like, rather than dismantling the hard work of someone else based on my own, personal, biases." (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.

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