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 Periodic Table of Google. "Every startup’s dream is to become a platform, creating an entire ecosystem of developers and users that rely on their product. Foursquare, Twitter, Amazon and others work hard to convince developers to build on their programming interfaces. But nobody comes close to Google. This diagram shows the vast array of tools and services that help developers build modern web applications, from commonplace components (search, maps) to the more esoteric (machine learning) It’s no coincidence that Android, the Hydrogen of Google’s world, reacts with pretty much everything." (Alistair for Hugh).
- Your flaws are my pain – LabSpaces. "We feel the pain of others. Which worked great in tribes, but in a Reality TV world – where millions can peer into the bedrooms and cat-fights of carefully chosen, meticulously edited human trainwrecks – our empathy makes prime-time TV positively cringe-worthy. FMRi scans of reality TV audiences showed an activation of the brain’s pain centers when a model tripped or a participant did something unknowingly embarrassing." (Alistair for Mitch).
- We need a GitHub of Science – marciovm’s posterous. "GitHub has become one of the most important platforms for open source coding projects. It combines a social network of coders with tools for managing (and showing), the codebase of software projects. This great article explores how the GitHub model could be applied to science." (Hugh for Alistair).
- To Whom Do We Owe This Money, Exactly? – Sturdy Blog. "UK blog Sturdy Blog asks one of those questions that makes you say… ‘wait a minute!’ The question is: ‘To Whom Do We Owe All This Money?’ That is, the UK has gone into huge debt bailing out the banks. But it looks as though much of that debt is owned by… the banks that got bailed out. Whaa? The post is a great starting point, and the comment thread is filled with much good explanation." (Hugh for Mitch).
- How Genius Works – The Atlantic. "The more I read, the more I believe that true genius can most easily be found and understood in art and creativity. Thinking about that concept a little more, it does feel like our work has now become our art (for many of us… and my hand is raised). This is especially true for people who come up with an idea and then launch a start-up. So, where does art, creativity and true genius come from? This amazing special report from The Atlantic looks at artists, ideas and how true genius manifests itself." (Mitch for Alistair).
- About That Lawsuit… – The Huffington Post. "Arianna Huffington and her business partners at The Huffington Post sold the company to AOL for for $315 million dollars. Now that the deal is closed, Arianna is facing a class-action law suit on behalf of more than 9,000 writers and other content providers for at least $105 million in damages. This is Arianna’s rebuttal and it might surprise you to know that I agree with The Huffington Post’s stance. Some people are calling what HuffPo did to writers slavery. Rubbish! No one put a gun to anyone’s head and every writer has this little thing called, ‘freewill’. As someone who has been writing professionally since I was 17 years old, I’ve written for free, for pay and for barter and understood (and chose) the terms and conditions with each writing opportunity. These writers are pissed because Arianna made $315 million on their backs? She was making revenue before that and nothing was ever promised to them (and they knew that). I wonder how many of these writers have received speaking opportunities, book deals and paid writing assignments because they had something credible like The Huffington Post on their resume? I also wonder if the people who did benefit from this monetarily ever gave any of those proceeds back to HuffPo considering that they may not have received these opps had they not used the Huffington Post’s reputation?" (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.