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:
- Strata New York 2011: John Rauser, "What is a Career in Big Data?" "Amazon‘s John Rauser gives a thought-provoking presentation (and he was only one of the great presenters, along with Mark Madsen, Panos Ipeirotis, Mike Nelson, Simon Wardley, and plenty of others; it’s hard to choose). In the end, I picked John’s session because it reminded me of James Burke’s amazing Connections series, weaving history, humor, and nerd chic into one superb speech." (Alistair for Hugh).
- Strata Summit 2011: Cory Doctorow, "Designing for Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes". "The speakers at last week’s Strata conference were astonishingly good. Speaking for humanity, is Cory Doctorow. I’d never met him in person; he’s intimidatingly technical, surprisingly human, and refreshingly approachable despite these. He did a great job of grounding otherwise esoteric discussions of data privacy in very personal terms. Well worth watching." (Alistair for Mitch).
- What Do Organisms Mean? – The New Atlantis. "A lovely and challenging essay about the meaning of life, sort of." (Hugh for Alistair).
- The Convictions of Conrad Black – Vanity Fair. "Love him or hate him, disgraced ex-Canadian ex-press baron Conrad Black is one hell of a character. He’s going back to jail." (Hugh for Mitch).
- Spirit of the Time – Ray Kurzweil at Zeitgeist Americas 2011. "While Alistair was at the Strata conference, I spent the early part of my week at Google Zeitgeist Americas 2011 which took place in Phoenix (more on that here: Google Zeitgeist 2011). One of the highlights was being able to see Ray Kurzweil speak. The two key take-aways from this amazing thirteen-minute presentation? 1. Finally, we can look at our own biology as information technology. 2. why we need to stop thinking in linear ways and why we need to start thinking about things as they should be: exponentially. This one is a mind-blower. Promise." (Mitch for Alistair).
- Beyond words: the Kindle Fire and the book’s future – Rough Type. "This week, Amazon launched their own tablet into the market (Kindle Fire). In this Blog post, Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows, The Big Switch and Does IT Matter?) takes a stab at what the Kindle meant and what this new tablet, Kindle Fire, means to the book reading world. Take note of this quote: ‘With the Fire, as with its its whizzy-gizmo predecessors, the iPad and the Nook Color, we are seeing the e-book begin to assume its true aesthetic, which would seem to be far closer to the aesthetic of the web than to that of the printed page.’ Have we arrived at the point in time where we no longer know what the difference is between a book, an app or a website?" (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.