Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #27

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, iambik, 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:

1. The Things He Carried – The Atlantic. "It’s the holidays, which means travel for many of us. In Europe, vacationers are frozen to their respective runways and train tracks; here in North America, we’re wringing our hands about the TSA and travel delays. In this 2008 exposé in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg (helped by Bruce Schneier, a rare voice of sanity in the security world) pranks airport security. His mischief is boundless: waving Hezbollah flags under the noses of guards, making fake boarding passes, and mimicking TSA squiggles to clear security. Yikes. Safe travels indeed." (Alistair for Hugh).
2. A New ‘Miracle on 34th St.,’ This Time Without Macy’s – The New York Times. "It’s time for some holiday spirit. Here’s some stuff I learned this week. First, the 1947 Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, may be the all-time best product placement, with actors vowing loyalty to the store on the silver screen. In the original, Macy‘s role was purely to make the story seem real, but the company bowed out of the 1994 remake — possibly because a sub-plot involving the store’s hard times was too close to the truth. This forced filmmakers to invent a fake store ("Coles") and even a fake parade." (Alistair for Mitch).
3. How to create a startup country – Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence. "I read a post recently about a lack of utopian vision. Well here is one, coming from Patri Friedman, grandson of free-market theorist, Milton Friedman. The idea goes something like this: government innovation isn’t keeping up with the needs of society. Could the solution come from competition from innovative start-ups? That is, government start-ups? Friedman calls for a movement of Seasteading… building floating, autonomous city-states, that create societies from scratch. What could possibly go wrong? (And those of you who are novelists and screenwriters: start your engines. The plotline possibilities are endless)." (Hugh for Alistair).
4. Who Writes Wikipedia? – Raw Thought. "This is an old article, but it was fascinating. The general theory of Wikipedia is that a small group does the majority of the work. But this article, written in 2006 (!), analyzed some data on Wikipedia articles and found something quite different: while the majority of *edits* are done by a small number (about a thousand dedicated people), the majority of *content* comes from infrequent users who tend to contribute a significant amount to one article. Not sure if that is surprising, but it’s always fun reading about Wikipedia." (Hugh for Mitch).
5. Data Visualization to Make Your Media Social – Search Engine Watch. "We tend to think of data as bits and bytes or zeroes and ones or something that might look halfway decent when displayed on either an Excel file or in some kind of chart. Infographics was one big deal this past year, but the lesson is deeper: if you’re really looking to make an impression, stop thinking about your data in terms of text and start thinking about your data in terms of how to best display the information so anyone looking at it can understand what the data is ‘saying.’" (Mitch for Alistair).
6. Why Blogs (Still) Aren’t Dead…No Matter What You’ve Heard – The Regator. "Just because Mashable runs with a story, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s one hundred percent accurate. It’s also important to know that they can (and have) changed the title of Blog posts when the facts of their stories have been called into question. That’s only half of the story in this very interesting Blog post about what is really happening in the Blogosphere. The net result: Blogs still matter (no kidding) and – if you just dig a little bit – you’ll also start uncovering that the content and interactions is getting better and better from a context and quality standpoint." (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.