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:
- Textbooks of Tomorrow – Online Education. "Tablets are consumption devices that favor the content publisher. With the Kindle Fire, it became obvious to everyone that to make a viable tablet, you need to run a cloud and deliver content. Does that mean News Corp will buy RIM and Yahoo and launch the Fox tablet? Stranger things have happened. Here’s an infographic from Online Education that looks at the trends in textbook publishing." (Alistair for Hugh).
- Ricky Gervais: My First Week In Hollywood – The Wall Street Journal. "Ricky Gervais chimes in on why game shows are boring, and the culture shock of moving from the BBC and the UK to the West Coast. ‘I got the limo to stop at a garage on the way and I got a family pack of some sort of Cheesy Wotsits. I ate these in time to get out to the red carpet. Jane pointed out that I now had orange hands and lips.’ Inimitable." (Alistair for Mitch).
- The reinvention of the night – The Times Literary Supplement. "Think Apple has changed society? (Or Google/Amazon/Facebook?)… They’ve got nothing on… ‘light’." (Hugh for Alistair).
- Fire – Chris Espinosa. "Remember ‘vertical integration’? When our cable companies were going to become content producers, and telephone/Internet companies started buying television stations and newspapers? Well vertical didn’t (Mark I) work out all that well for the cable companies, but Apple figured out that owning the device (iPod, then iPhone, then iPad) and the store (iTunes), meant that you could take a slice out of every transaction. That’s a much nicer business than sweating over guessing what people want to buy/watch/listen to, and then spending lots of money producing it. Amazon, though, just threw the gauntlet down, with the Kindle Fire – a cheap, lightweight tablet that is device + store as well. But Amazon is taking on more than Apple: they are taking on Google. The Silk browser built into the Fire actually washes all your web interactions through Amazon’s servers, and caches everything. The benefit to the consumer is faster browsing. The benefit to Amazon is that they will know everything that you do on the Web. So, the Fire tablet ($200! – I’m tempted!) means Amazon controls: a) the device b) the store and c) your brain. We, truly, live in interesting times, watching the three web giants battling out our future." (Hugh for Mitch).
- Steve Jobs And Bill Gates Together At D5. "I’m still sad about the news that Steve Jobs died. I know he’s been sick for a while, but there was something in my brain that thought, ‘he’ll make it through!’ One of the best tweets I saw moments after his death came from Joshua Schachter (the founder of Delicious). He tweeted: iSad. This video is from All Things Digital and it’s a ninety-minute conversation between Job and Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates (one of the rare times they’ve shared a stage). People are trying to understand the impact that Jobs had on technology and business, but they’re missing the big picture: Steve Jobs had a profound impact on our world. This conversation is one for the ages…" (Mitch for Alistair).
- Innovation Starvation – World Policy Institute. "I’m not a huge fan of fiction, but Neal Stephenson‘s Snow Crash remains one of my favorite books. Imagine my thrill and delight to find out that Stephenson recently published his thoughts on innovation and (maybe) where we’ve got it all wrong. You may think that a science fiction writer can’t possibly have a true grasp on innovation in our society… you would be sorely wrong. Whether you agree with his thoughts or not, this is one piece with tons of provocations. The exact kind of provocations we need right now." (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.