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:
- The Food Lab: A New Way to Cook Pasta? – Serious Eats. "Scandal! All those rules of cooking pasta in huge tubs of furiously boiling water are a lie, apparently. Turns out you can simmer pasta in a little water just fine. But that takes all the bravado out of it." (Alistair for Hugh).
- The 350-Year-Old British Post Office Is Leading The Mobile Payments Charge – Fast Company. "When I was in England recently, I visited the Post Office. It wasn’t what I remembered. It’s a modern place for all sorts of transactions, from on-demand payment cards to identification. And it occurred to me that, in the future, we’re going to need an Internet Embassy. We’ll require a place to connect our online and real-world lives. Here in North America, that could be the bank or the DMV. But the Post Office was my first view of what, I think, will be a cornerstone of lives lived both online and off." (Alistair for Mitch).
- Superweeds: A Long-Predicted Problem for GM Crops Has Arrived – The Atlantic. "This week, two lefty ‘I told you so’ articles. The first one is from The Atlantic: environmentalists have long argued that genetically modified crops, and the heavy use of weed-killing herbicides they are designed to withstand, would result in superweeds, resistant to those same herbicides. Looks like the superweeds have arrived." (Hugh for Alistair).
- Mother Jones article from 1999: Repeal of Glass-Steagall will ‘create too-big-to-fail institutions that are someday likely to drain the public treasury as taxpayers bail out imperiled financial giants to protect the stability of the nation’s banking system.’ – Reddit. "The second ‘I told you so’ article is from Mother Jones, about the 1999 repeal of major banking regulations in the USA. This Reddit discussion thread points out that just about everything in that article came to pass (too-big-to-fail, financial disaster, taxpayer bailouts etc). The original article is a sobering reading, and the Reddit comment thread, as always, is filled with good stuff as well." (Hugh for Mitch).
- When "Creative Destruction" Destroys More than It Creates – Harvard Business Review. "Whenever someone says that they’re in the business of ‘creative destruction’ or that they have penchant to ‘cannibalize’ their own business, it always gives me pause. Is the ability to know what to destroy or what to cannibalize a learned and scientific skill or is it a gut reaction? The more I think about business philosophy – in particular when I look at people like investment advisors and those who play the stock market – I think that they are (more or less) gamblers. Yes, some use data, but the majority are working off of their own gut. That could be good. It could be bad. I’m apathetic to sides. I’m more curious about topics like this: when things are destroyed or cannibalized, does anyone ever take stock to see what value of the things that were destroyed along with it?" (Mitch for Alistair).
- Recipes – IFTTT. "I always frown upon those brands who are looking for shortcuts. In particular, the brands (and individuals) who are looking for ways to automate their social media experience. It’s screams of being inauthentic but it also undermines the entire point of what makes social media so great (in my own, humble, estimation): the real interactions between real human beings. That being said, I could not help but smile and be curious about this site: If This Then That (IFTTT). What is, ultimately, a huge, long list of social media macros to make it look like you’re sharing and thanking a lot of people can now be automated by following some of their recipes. Check this out, you may well soon find yourself automating your own social media experience to make it look like you’re doing a whole lot more than you truly are." (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.