Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #17

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, Rednod, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, Bite-Sized Edits, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for each other (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:

Google’s CEO: ‘The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists’ – The Atlantic. "You may have heard the quote, but the full interview with Eric Schmidt at the Washington Ideas Forum is worth your time (video below). When he said, ‘all the laws are written by lobbyists,’ he was widely criticized – indeed, Schmidt seems to have a knack for telling us simple truths we don’t want to hear, often to the chagrin of his PR team. With corporations and unions more free than ever to influence political process, it’s nice to see someone pointing out the obvious." (Alistair for Hugh).
Bass Guitarist Victor Wooten Gives A ‘Music Lesson’ – NPR. "A music lesson. In this NPR podcast, Victor Wooten (and his kids!) give us a music lesson. Much as Ray Luk‘s Bitnorth explanation of the haunting On The Nature of Daylight helped me listen to it with new ears, so hearing this five-time Grammy Award winner explain and demonstrate various techniques gave me new appreciation for the bass." (Alistair for Mitch).
Rain Men: The lost language of Italian parasols and the men who made them – The Paris Review. "Just a lovely, and too short, bit of writing, history, and

linguistics, on the umbrella makers of Piedmont in Italy (from whence the first European umbrellas came), and their secret language, Tarùsc." (Hugh for Alistair).
Under Cover: Underman lookbook – HypeBeast. "In the fashion industry, a ‘lookbook’ is a set of photographs showing off a clothing line, photographer etc. Here is a stunning peek at the lookbook from the Spring/Summer collection from Jun Takahashi‘s lablel, Under Cover. It’s live-action manga as fashion shoot, or vice versa. I send this link to Mitch, because of his insistence that ‘brands *are* media publishers.’ In this case, we have an extreme: the clothes/fashion are expressed through the storyboard for a live action manga movie or book. What’s interesting here is how closely the artistic impulse for the clothes and the photographs are intertwined – the media is of the ‘brand,’ the brand is of the media. Also the pics are wild." (Hugh for Mitch).
Twitter Crushing Facebook’s Click-Through Rate: Report – Fast Company. "This story ripped though Twitter and Blogs like a brushfire this past week (no wonder). It turns out that you need very different online metrics and web analytics when attempting to do anything on both Twitter and Facebook (no shock there). It also turns out that Twitter generates a much higher clickthrough rate, but Facebook smashed all when it comes to people sharing content and information. This article is further proof that web analytics and how we monitor websites is going to change and morph even more. It’s also further proof that Twitter and Facebook have little in common in terms of usage." (Mitch for Alistair).
The "Imbecile" and "Moron" Responds: On the Freedoms of Remix Creators – The Huffington Post. "There’s nothing like rekindling the digital rights management debate by having Lawrence Lessig judge a Vimeo remix contest. OK, that wasn’t what set off the folks on Twitter, it was Lessig’s speech that did it (video below). We’re going to have to come to some sort of resolution on this in the very near future. It simply can’t wait. The old use of ‘fair use’ just doesn’t work in this remix culture and trying to maintain publishing control by geographic region seems equally archaic. No, I don’t have the answer, but Hugh is always neck-deep in this debate, so I’m sure the fodder here will get him to chime in." (Mitch for Hugh).