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:

• How I became a password cracker – Ars Technica. "It’s no secret that people have bad password hygiene, or that companies like Google are racing to replace single-factor passwords with something better (like, say, having your mobile phone near the place you’re logging in from.) But I didn’t realize just how easy it was to break into something. Fortunately, Ars Technica invested a day doing things a reasonably geeky home user might, and fairly quickly cracked an abundance of passwords. Here’s their journal." (Alistair for Hugh).
• SXSW, bikes, and the Zen of finding things out – Lean Analytics. "When we started this link thing, I told myself I wouldn’t forward stuff I’ve written. It’s the height of narcissism. But the original premise for this link-sharing stuff was to give one another the things we’d be furiously sharing over lunch. If we had lunch today, all I’d be talking about is my adventures with bikes, and what they taught me about life. So here’s a somewhat lengthy, and hopefully funny, story about my first SXSW." (Alistair for Mitch).
• Pingbacks, another federated web technology, dying – Andraz Tori Blog. "The Web I ‘grew up on’ unlocked such power and promise: everyone could be a publisher of their own content, on their own platforms. This new possibility was driven by a few powerful technologies: easy free/open source blogging technology (mainly WordPress), RSS – which enabled readers of blogs to get alerts when there was a new post, and outgoing links (from one blog to another), and ‘pingbacks.’ Pingbacks alerted bloggers when another blogger linked to them – allowing bloggers to find each other and build networks of interest, upon which a new attention economy emerged. The world has shifted since those wooly days of the past. While many still run their own blogs, mostly this is being replaced with networks managed by big companies: Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Consumer use of the RSS protocol – as the recent announced closure of Google Reader indicates – is no longer a growing phenomenon, replaced with the more organic discovery mechanisms of activity streams (again: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook), and the links posted there within our social networks. This article talks about yet another fading technology: pingbacks – again replaced by the activity in closed social networks, Retweets and Likes in Facebook. Are the days of the independent, but federated Web coming to a close? I hope not, but that certainly looks to be the case." (Hugh for Alistair).
• Smartphone link most important feature for U.S. car buyers, industry figure says – The Globe & Mail. "The future imagined 20 or 30 years ago involved virtual reality, time travel, jetpacks and teleportation. It turns out that what we have delivered to ourselves instead is… information. Lots and lots of information. And we cannot get enough of it. Instead of having visual virtual reality, we now informational virtual reality: we have access to just about all the (public) information in the universe, along with all of the private conversations we might want to have, all the time, and everywhere – through our smartphones. And this, it turns out, is the thing people want more than anything. According to this article, people are starting to buy cars not based on price or quality, but rather, on how well a car integrates with their smartphones." (Hugh for Mitch).
• 7 Lessons From the World’s Most Captivating Presenters – HubSpot. "Giving presentations is not easy. Many try. Many claim to be professional speakers. TED showed the world that there are both ideas worth spreading in public speaking and that it is increasingly harder to make your mark. The reason it’s harder to make that mark is because we all have online access to almost every speaker – at any given moment. We used to talk about death by PowerPoint, but it has become much more serious. With TED Talks and more everywhere, it’s increasingly difficult to give a presentation and not be compared to some of the greats. I’ve written about my escapades as a public speakers and I’ve offered my share of advice. People like Nick Morgan, Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds are the types of people that probably forget more about the topic than I know. Still, this extensive piece is a great primer for anyone who is expected to get on stage and keep an audience interested." (Mitch for Alistair).
• Amazon’s Head of Mobile Interfaces – MIT Technology Review. "Amazon is a dangerous company. Just this week they announced the acquisition of Goodreads. And, that’s the thing. Most people still think of Amazon as a book seller. Nothing could be further from reality. This article, provides additional depth into one of the most fascinating (and, somewhat, secretive) companies in the world. Amazon is a hardware company, an analytics company, a technology company, a retail company, a tablet company, a software company, a media company and much, much more. When people think of tech, they think of Google and Twitter and Facebook. When people think of retail, they think of Walmart and Target and more. While the world pays a lot of attention to Amazon, this piece makes me realize that we still need to pay more attention to them." (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.