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:

• What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy? – Greenheart Games. “Games get copied a lot– so much so that it’s hard to make a living at it. So, when you’re making a game about making a game, what happens when people who pirate it encounter piracy? Suddenly, they become pretty practical about it.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Enter Restricted Government Areas in Virtual Reality – The Creators Project. “There’s plenty we’re not supposed to see, top secret and redacted. Much of that privacy happens through tech, and James Bridle is trying to reveal these secrets with tech too. In this project, the artist makes immersive environments so any citizen can see private tribunals, and late-night airfields that are otherwise hidden from sight.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Web Design: The First 100 Years – Idle Words. “Maciej Ceglowski, creator of pinboard.in (inspired by Delicio.us) writes about the myth of Moore’s Law, and what the web is really good at (connecting knowledge, people and cats), and what we’re trying to make it do (eat the world). He makes the case that we might lose this wonderful web of cats, knowledge and people, and we should be careful.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The world is getting better all the time, in 11 maps and charts – Vox. “I’ve never met a doomsday/bad news story I didn’t fall in love with, but it’s always good to check the data. Of course, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics… never mind info viz. But still. It’s encouraging to see some charts that suggest everything isn’t going down the toilet.” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• CrossFit’s extremely lucrative business plan is also deceptively simple – Quartz. “When I ask you about which businesses are super-hot right now, I bet you’re inclined to talk about the stuff coming out of Silicon Valley, or other tech hubs. Being a startup has become synonomous with having an app or some cloud-based business. I first saw CrossFit back in 2001, when it was a simple blog with one different type of workout every day, that could be done with some simple gear and in a garage. To see it now, is to see a real thing of beauty. Go ahead, look to Silicon Valley for your case studies, I’d rather look a brilliant business models like CrossFit.” (Mitch for Alistair). 
• Cool at 13, Adrift at 23 – Well @ The New York Times. “I ran into some friends that I had not seen since high school. It was an amazing experience. I really loved them as friends, had re-connected thanks to Facebook, but we never saw each other in our ‘protein forms.’ As is the case in these scenarios, we started talking about others we went to school with. I wondered what had happened to someone we all thought was the coolest in our grade? ‘Oh,’ said one of them… ‘not so great anymore…’ It turns out that this individual is struggling. I wondered why. ’ hey peaked in high school’, suggested one of them. It gave me pause. Then, a couple of weeks later, this article came across my radar. We all want our kids to be liked and accepted, well, it turns out that you may want your kids to not be so cool in high school, after all…” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.