Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 353

Paid Content

What would you pay to listen to an episode of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast?

Don't panic, I have no plans to start charging for my weekly marketing podcast. On Twitter, I was having some back and forth between Gary Vaynerchuk (Crush It and The Thank You Economy) and Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics - An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0) and we decided that we will soon record a three-way audio Podcast to discuss branding, Social Media and analytics. @benjaminbach tweeted: "I'd buy that," to which, Gary responded with: "hmmmmm buy huh? How much? For an hour? I'm serious, curious about future of content."

Would you pay for that type of content?

I started thinking about paid content, Social Media and how people perceive the act of paying for content (it's a topic I've covered before: Free Content Is Killing Media (And Advertising), Blogging And Podcasting As A Business Model, Content Pays and When We Switch From Free To Paid). The first thought that came to mind was: what if I made that one, special, episode a premium episode and attached a fee to it? It wasn't about making money, but much more about attempting to answer Gary's question about the perceived value of the information being presented. Being the Media Hacker that I am, I started thinking: what if I charged $0.99 per episode via iTunes? Surely an hour listening to Seth Godin or Chris Brogan or Steve Wozniak and I chat must be worth $0.99? Obviously, by charging for the Podcast, I would then diminish the size of the listening audience, but does that really matter? The content is not advertising supported, so there's no additional value to having a whole bunch of free ears listening in on my weekly marketing conversations. Then, a final thought struck me: what if I charged $0.99 per episode but also left all of the episodes available for free as they are now?

At this point, you're probably thinking: "has Mitch lost his mind?"

Hear me out: This isn't about exclusion. It's about inclusion. If you want the content but don't feel that it's worth any money, that's fine. It's there for the taking. If you want the content and learn from the content, is it worth under one dollar? People who are willing to pay for their content (and you can replace the word "content" with "education," "personal development" or "learning") are a different breed. They not only assign a different value to the content, they have different expectations and interactions with it. For over fifteen years, I was in the music industry and was given every CD and concert ticket for free, trust me when I say that your perception of the content changes when it's free from when it's paid for. In the end, I'm not going to be charging for my content on the Blog and/or the Podcast. I'm doing my best to get my ideas to spread, so free is the perfect price for me, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about new models and ideas for a world that will ultimately have to pay for content - in some way, shape or form.

What do you think?

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Talking About Anything And Everything With CD Baby Founder Derek Sivers

Episode #263 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

How far would you go to get something done? Derek Sivers was an independent artist trying to sell his CDs online back in 1998. None of the big online retailers of music would sell his music. He wasn't on a major label and he wasn't a "known" entity. Instead of sulking about it, Sivers went out, bought a book on Web programming, turned to page one and started to figure out - on his own - how to build a website and integrate it with a merchant account. This led to creation of CD Baby - which quickly grew to become the largest seller of independent music and artists in the world. In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby for $22 million. Most recently, he released his first business book, Anything You Want, on Seth Godin's The Domino Project book publishing imprint. It's an amazing and candid look at what it takes to create a great company (and it's a powerful story for all Marketers to hear). This past week, I published the Blog post, Anything You Want, and some of the quote were culled from this chat with Sivers. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #263.

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advertising

anything you want

awaken your superhero

bite size edits

blog

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blue sky factory

book oven

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cc chapman

cd baby

chris brogan

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david usher

derek sivers

digital dads

digital marketing

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hugh mcguire

in over your head

itunes

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librivox

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media hacks

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podcasting

pressbooks

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social media 101

social media marketing

strategy

ted talk

the domino project

trust agents

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #57

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:

Why I will never pursue cheating again - A Computer Scientist in a Business School . "This week is all about cheating. First up: Panos Ipeirotis is a professor at NYU who wrote a detailed post about rampant plagiarism and how he tried to tackle it, using tools that try to detect content copied from elsewhere. It was too effective: he found that nearly a quarter of students had cheated, and by trying to enforce them, he claims his bonus and student evaluation dropped significantly. The original post (which I've linked to) has since been taken down pending legal review; check in later if it comes back. But, far more interesting is the online debate that started at Y Combinator 's Hacker News . Panos is now fielding objections and challenges from many of his students. (Full disclosure: Panos is teaching a session for me at O'Reilly's Strata JumpStart conference in September, but I found this post independently)" (Alistair for Hugh).

Collusion - @toolness . "There's a lot of confusion about how much you can be tracked as you use the Web. Basically, if a site embeds content from a third party (such as an advertiser) then that advertiser can tell when you visit other sites into which they also inject content. Collusion is a Firefox plug-in that maps how you're being tracked as you surf. Even if you don't have Firefox, click the 'Click Here' link at left for an example of just how well your online movements are tracked as you travel from site to site." (Alistair for Mitch).

Jim Henson's Fantastic World - Museum Of The Moving Image . "For some reason, I'm willing to wager Alistair is a big Jim (Muppets) Henson fan. If any of you readers are, and if you find yourself in NYC, why not pop over to the Museum of the Moving Image to see the Henson exhibit?" (Hugh for Alistair).

Cell Phones - XKCD . "Does cancer cause cell phones? A webcomic from the always-brilliant xkcd." (Hugh for Mitch).

Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle - The New York Times . "A recruiter recently told me that 80% of resumes have lies in them. Think about that for just one second: that means that 80% of the people you have employed started off with a lie (some big, some small). For years, I've been saying that Social Media is the new resume. Yes, I'm aware that it is not kosher for HR to snoop through an individual's social media activity, but it's public and there for the world to see. This article pushes the idea just a little bit further. If you thought jumping through the hurdles of a credit check and criminal background check seemed a little over-the-top, think about how you would fare passing a Social Media background check." (Mitch for Alistair).

Periodic Table of Typefaces - Behance . "You can talk up design and architecture all you want, I'm a sucker for a beautiful font. I love fonts and typefaces (and I know Hugh does too). If you've never seen the documentary, Helvetica , you're missing out, so check it out. Neutraface, Gotham and yes, even Helvetica. I love it!" (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.

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alistair croll

behance

bitcurrent

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collusion

complete web monitoring

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human 20

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librivox

link

linkbait

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museum of the moving image

nyu

oreilly strata jumpstart

panos ipeirotis

periodic table of typefaces

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pressbooks

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the book oven

the new york times

webcomic

xkcd

y combinator

year one labs

Marshall@100

When you think of media, you better think of Marshall McLuhan.

Personally, I've struggled with the thinking of Marshall McLuhan. His work is deep, rich and thick... it often makes me feel like I'm stupid because I can't grasp it right off the bat. I often grapple with a simple sentence that the theorist put forward. The way his words and speaking came together gives pause. And, while his most notable saying, "the medium is the message" is still a concept that is widely discussed, debated and deconstructed, the river of media insights from this one individual is staggering.

McLuhan would have been 100 years old this week.

My friend, Michael Hinton, has been Blogging about McLuhan over at his Blog/online experience, From Marshall & Me. Check this out from his last Blog post, Time gentlemen (and ladies) please!, from July 21st, 2011: "It is time to say good bye to Dr. Herbert Marshall McLuhan - media explorer, theorist, prophet, and celebrity. This blog began in September, 2009, on the anniversary of the stroke that took away his power to speak and ends, today on the 100th anniversary of his birth.  Each post, this is number 452, has looked at one of McLuhan's observations, ideas, thoughts, opinions, or experiences.  I am saying good bye to Marshall now not because there is nothing left to say, but because it seems to me a good time to move on. I have had the wondrous experience of viewing the world for a time through Marshall's eyes and I thank you for joining me in this attempt to understand him better.  It has been at various times thrilling, disciplining, and surprising, an adventure, a job and an obsession, but I have never found it dull. And that's the way I want to keep it."

Dive into McLuhan.

Stop reading this now. Take 15 minutes and head over to From Marshall & Me... and dig in.

It will make you smarter. Promise.

Tags:

blogging

from marshall and me

mashall mcluhan

media

media explorer

media insight

michael hinton

Monetizing Your Leaderboard

The trouble with new media is that it's hard to tell the pretenders from the the professionals.

If an individual with no followers on Twitter has decades of real-life work experience and the individual with hundreds of thousands of followers only pontificates, plagiarizes and hasn't proven themselves in-market, what is the consumer supposed to do? It's not all that hard to establish some kind of Social Media beachfront and - with a few tactical moves - quickly gain notoriety and respect in a digital kind of way, but you can't fake a portfolio.

You can't fake a track record, either.

If you're not sure if you're getting expert advice, ask to see a portfolio, ask to see results and ask to speak to past clients. Social Media goes both ways. If you think someone is a fraud, why not leverage Social Media to figure it out. This past week, Media Hacks co-host, friend and Social Media darling, Chris Brogan (co author of Trust Agents with Julien Smith), took flack (which, for some reason, he is a lightning rod for) over a webinar he created on showing people how to use Google + (more on that here: Selling Information). The argument goes that no one can claim to be an expert on something that is so new. Brogan was also called "very opportunistic," according to Gini Dietrich over at Spin Sucks in her Blog post, Beware The Google + Experts (I'd recommend reading the comments too, but there are close to 450 of them, so pack a lunch), and the debate has raged on all week (yes, I realize how very "high school" most of this is).

Ask. Just ask.

I readily admit that Google + has been a challenge for me. Not in understanding what it does and how it works, but in getting my circles organized and really spending some time, neck-deep in it, to figure out the value proposition (for me and my clients at Twist Image). When I saw that Chris was offering a webinar on it, I seriously considered attending and paying for it. Yes, I'm sure there are a lot of free tutorials online via YouTube or great Blog posts that explain how to make it work, but none of those are Chris Brogan's perspective on it. When it comes to explaining these online tools and platforms, I always learn something new from Chris (and I'm not just saying that because I consider him a friend). He's smart, he sees the business implications and - if I'm going to be very raw here - I often disagree with him, so watching him explain something (especially when I disagree) helps me to formulate my own perspective. If I didn't know Chris and I was skeptical about someone giving a webinar on Google +, I'd simply hop over to Twitter and tweet: "I'm considering taking @chrisbrogan's webinar on Google +. Has anyone ever taken one of his webinars before? Worth it?" The feedback I receive could then be parsed by both the content and the person writing it (and my relationship to them). If you don't know an individual, a business or a brand, It's not all that hard anymore to find out if Brogan (or any other brand) offers value on the dollar.

You can't run. You can't hide.

Chris and I are very different people who run in very similar circles. I don't have any plans to monetize the people who read this Blog (or listen to my Podcast or read my articles). My endgame is the client work we're doing at Twist Image and every piece of content that you see out of me (free or paid) is either me thinking things through in public and/or me creating awareness and attention about the agency. Chris is monetizing his leaderboard. He works hard to create tons of content for free in the hopes that people click links and buy something (a book, a speaking event, a webinar, a company consultation). That's his business and he's been successful at it... and he seems happy about it. The truth is that whether or not he positions himself as an expert is irrelevant: the market will decide. If the free content doesn't strike a chord, the audience leaves. If the paid content doesn't strike a chord, his family goes hungry. To me, that's the amazing thing about Social Media: the market is live, in real-time and it's speaking with their hearts, minds and wallets for all to see and hear.

Sounds like good business to me.

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How I Write

Wouldn't it be a magical world if someone could tell you - in detail - how to write a best-selling novel or a hit song?

The truth is that there is a whole lot of secret sauce  involved in outputting creative work. It's hard to describe why one piece of writing resonates over another. I'm often asked about how I write, what I use to write and where my ideas for content come from? (along with how I decide on where things should go? Blog? Article? Book? Client idea? etc...). These are the three pillars of what culminates in my final output of writing...

1. The Tools.

The tools I use to write are as follows:

MacBook Pro (soon to be the new MacBook Air).

Microsoft Word for newspaper and magazine articles.

Windows Live Writer for Blog post writing.

Scrivener for book and book proposal writing.

Evernote and Noteshelf is where I keep all notes and ideas.

I rarely write notes out by hand, so no more pens, Moleskine notebooks, etc...

I use Google Bookmarks to save all Web-based content.

2. The Tactics.

The ideas for content come from the following areas:

I still subscribe to a lot of email newsletters (old habits die hard) on topics as far-reaching as marketing, public relations, branded content, technology, art, music, fashion, innovation, etc...

I use Google Reader and subscribe to many Blogs and news websites (I complement this with news apps, etc... on my iPhone and iPad).

I follow interesting people and what they're linking to in spaces like Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flipboard, etc...

I try to read a book every week on various topics from business and marketing to creativity and innovation (I don't often read fiction).

I still read the daily local newspaper and I try to grab the national newspapers a few times a week.

I love magazines. Everything from Wired and Fast Company to Monocle and The Economist.

I consumer and study a lot of art (more on that here: Study Art).

I try to have a "nose for news" (like I said, old habits die hard, and this one is from my days in Journalism).

3. The Techniques.

All of the tools and tactics in the world don't mean anything without the physical act of breaking through everything to sit down and write (no one explains this better than Steven Pressfield in his must-read business book, Do The Work!). Writing is a process of asking a question about something that inspired me - at any given moment - and trying to use critical thinking to create a thought or moment in time about it. In fact, Nate Guggia, asked me in an email today, "where does all the content come from?  Writing on a daily takes skill," and that was the inspiration for this Blog post. The placement of those ideas is something that comes very naturally to me, as well (I usually have more ideas to Blog or write about than I actually publish). I can just tell - as the idea begins to percolate - if it would be best-suited for a Blog post or for an article. When it comes to writing a book, once the core premise is established, my perusal of content on a frequent and regular basis usually gives me tons of inspiration, and I save those ideas and notes in Evernote and then organize them with Scrivener. Personally, I like telling stories and relating them to items in the news to create context rather than writing "how to" or instructional posts. I also write from a very visceral place. I don't write in pieces, but usually in one shot and then publish it as quickly as possible. It's rare that I write posts and then cue them up in a scheduled format and I tend to work best on very short/tight deadlines ("if it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done") verses other authors who write, re-write, think, pace, write some more, tweak and edit. I tend to let the idea brew inside of me to the point where the content must come out.

How about you? What kind of writer are you? What works best for you?

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Anything You Want

What If You Can Have It All?

This past week, Montreal hosted the first-ever International Startup Festival (from July 13th - 15th, 2011). It was attended by close to one thousand participants from all over the world - all of which were hopeful of leaving the drudgery of nine-to-five work to start their own entrepreneurial venture and let go of a traditional working environment. Moving towards being a Founder of a Startup is the 2011 version of "take this job and shove it," but the journey can be long, hard and confusing. This is one of the reasons why so many people attend events like this. It's also the main reason why the majority of startups never succeed. In fact, listening to the opening keynote speaker at International Startup Festival, Dave McClure (a venture capitalist who has worked with companies like PayPal, Mint, Facebook and LinkedIn) the sentiment was downright negative. McClure dropped more f-bombs than Lewis Black and provoked the audience to never contemplate doing a startup if they like the notion of free time and a family life. This framework was only amplified by Sarah Prevette (founder of Sprouter.com) who said during her presentation that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, the work ethic is pretty simple: "if you're awake... work." This sort of talk is sobering for those who are contemplating the old middle finger to the job their currently living through.

It's also goes well beyond how great of a business idea that you think you have.

Along with the stress and sleepless nights of starting your own business in the hopes that you have the next Facebook, you also have to get used to rejection. Pandora - another darling of the new Internet revolution - is a music recommendation engine that was rejected for funding over 300 times. Think about that the next time you ask someone out on a date. How much rejection can one person bare? About one month ago, Pandora (which is only available in the US) went IPO with a market cap worth close to three billion dollars (that is not a typo). It proves two points:

Being persistent helps.

Having a product that people care about trumps what one (or 300) venture capitalists think.

Then, there are people like Derek Sivers.

I first met Sivers in-person while attending a TED conference several years back. We were introduced by best-selling business book author and marketing guru, Seth Godin, in a Westin hotel lobby. I knew Sivers by reputation only. A passionate musician, Sivers realized in 1997 that there was no place online for independent musicians to sell their CDs, so he put down his guitar and bought a computer-programming book to do it himself. He literally sat down and started figuring out how to program a website out of a book. In 1998, he launched CD Baby to sell his own CDs. Friends then asked him if he could sell their music too, so while iTunes and some of the other big online music sellers were tussling with the major record labels, "CD Baby went on to become the largest seller of independent music on the Web, with over $100 million in sales for over 150,000 musicians," according to the Wikipedia entry for CD Baby. In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby for $22 million.

Anything you want.

Most recently, Sivers released his first business book, Anything You Want, via Seth Godin's new book publishing imprint, The Domino Project (powered by Amazon). The book is only 88 pages and reads more like a confessional about what it means to be a true entrepreneur, founder and startup than the usual standard fare. There are moments that are downright heartbreaking and honest as Sivers writes candidly about what it took to move CD Baby from his living room to one of the most innovative businesses in the world - much to his own chagrin.

It also happens to be one of the best business books I've read all year (and in the Top 10 for the last decade).

"In my ten years of doing CD Baby, I did some stuff right and a lot of things wrong and I'm intentionally rubbing my nose in my own mistakes," said Sivers via Skype from his current home in Singapore last week. "I want to make sure that I really do learn from my mistakes, so I'm sharing them publicly and it's actually kind of embarrassing. So, while it's a way to ensure that I learn from my own mistakes, it's also a warning to others so that they can avoid some of the situations I found myself in."

But the biggest lesson anyone contemplating starting their business needs to understand is why they would start their own business in the first place? From Facebook to Google and LinkedIn to Twitter, almost every startup had the same genesis, and CD Baby was no different...

"I had to scratch my own itch. I wanted to sell my music online and there was no place that would sell it for me. I figured, 'how hard could it be to set up my own stupid credit card merchant account and do this myself?' It wasn't this feeling that I had uncovered some huge business opportunity; I was just doing it for me," reveals Sivers. No grand scheme... just something he would like to see/use out in the market. "I thought it was stupid that the big online record stores wouldn't take my account because I was not distributed by a major record label. It was just a little hack I pulled off because nobody would do it for me. Then friends started asking me to do the same thing for them... and then strangers. It still wasn't a business at that point. My actual business was being a musician. I was living my dream. I didn't want anything to get in between me and my music. I didn't want to start a business."

If you study some of the great entrepreneurs or if you take an hour to read Derek Sivers' amazing book, Anything You Want, you'll begin to realize that the best businesses were rarely created for massive profits, exit strategies or to be flipped. They were built because one individual wanted something, and it turns out that it was something that others wanted as well.

It makes business feel just a little bit more human and personal during these unwieldy times.

The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Starting business a hard, confusing slog.

Vancouver Sun - not yet published.

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anything you want

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cd baby

dave mcclure

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internet revolution

ipo

itunes

lewis black

linkedin

marketing guru

mint

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sarah prevette

seth godin

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the domino project

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vc

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wikipedia

The 6 Types Of Twitter Trolls

As great as Twitter is, there are many people who use and abuse it to the point of absurdity.

Wikipedia defines a "troll" as "someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion." While Twitter definitely has people like this engaged in the online social network, I've decided to expand the definition (sue me) to nefarious, self-involved types of people on Twitter that, ultimately, make people collectively groan in disappointment. You know, people who - to be blunt - very annoying.

The 6 Types of Twitter Trolls: 

The "Calling You Out" Troll. Too much self-promotion on Twitter can be a bad thing. While some people are very successful at packing their stream with self-involved chatter, it takes a classy and fine balance to get the self-promotion right. Let's face it, while Twitter is a great communications channel, it's also a great tool to self-promote, which allows others to learn more about you and what you're all about. The problem is that The Calling You Out Troll won't let even the hint of a self-promotional tweet float by without making a snide remark.

The Freeloader Troll. Just because I have a Blog and Podcast that offers a lot of information for free, it doesn't mean that I am not entitled to make a living. As an agency owner, my time is paid for by the clients that we serve at Twist Image. Furthermore, when I signed a book publishing with Grand Central Publishing, it was understood that I would work hard to sell as many copies of Six Pixels of Separation as possible. Not everything is free in this world, so if you join and follow people on Twitter for the sole purpose of trying to score some free stuff, by tweeting it out for the world to see, you're a freeloader.

The Link Jumping Troll. It's amazing to see how many people retweet other people's links without even clicking on it to see if it's good and/or worthy of sharing with their own social graph. It seems to me that individuals do this in the hopes of getting the attention of the person who tweeted out the link in the first place. Everyone likes their content to be retweeted (it's very flattering), but there's no real flattery if the person who retweets your link does so without even checking to see if the link is valid. You may be wondering how someone would know if The Link Jumping Troll is doing this? If you publish a 500-word Blog post and it gets retweeted five seconds after you tweet about it, odds are that person never even looked at your content.

The Public Shaming Troll. "Hey, did you get my email?" You have to love tweets like that. Have these trolls never seen the movie, Swingers? One communication channel works just fine. You don't need to leave a voicemail, then email, then Tweet, then message someone on Facebook to see if they got your voicemail. You just need some patience. On top of that, when you tweet a message like that in Twitter, it is very akin to a public shaming. It's like the troll is purposefully trying to call you out and get you to respond faster.

The Brand Jacker Troll. You have to love and admire this special breed. These are the individuals who have a gripe with a brand and then spend every waking hour responding to everyone else's customer service issues with a tweet like, "I'm so sorry to hear about your problems with Brand A. Did you happen to see what Brand B did to me?" While it's a clever way to drive more links and attention to your own personal cause, it's kind of like asking out your friend's girlfriend... while they're still dating.

The IRL Troll. Do you know how many times someone has cancelled a meeting IRL (In Real Life) only to be found out that during the allotted time they were on Twitter? I'm also a big fan of actually being on a conference call with these types of Trolls and seeing them tweet while they're supposed to be paying attention to what's happening in the meeting. These people seem to think that Twitter falls outside of the real space time continuum, and that it's improbable that anyone else would have a Hootsuite window open to see who is actually working and who is busy futzing around on Twitter.

Yes, there are the real spammers too or those who follow and connect on Twitter and then have the most unrelenting barrage of daily and weekly requests as if you were blood relatives. You see, it's sometimes easy to forget that you're connecting to people and not just to a keyboard. Without the context of having to walk over to someone you don't know, look them in the eyes and try to make a real connection, Twitter can give people a strong sense of false courage. The majority of people I connect with are caring and interesting people. This majority of people on Twitter are just trying to build connections and bridges, but there are a lot of trolls out there who really are manipulating the platform in an attempt to make it bend to their own, personal, will.

Now, all that's left is to figure out what to do about all of these Twitter Trolls?

Tags:

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brand

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chat room

communications channel

content

facebook

grand central publishing

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online social network

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social graph

swingers

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twitter troll

wikipedia

Media Hacks Is Back With Episode #38

Episode #262 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to. This is also episode #38 of Media Hacks.

And we're back! Chris Brogan, Hugh McGuire and I dig deep into Google + - the new online social network from Google that has over 10 million users in under two weeks and over one billion items shared. We look at what this new entry into Social Media means to Facebook, Twitter, business and beyond. If you're curious about Google + and the ever-changing landscape of our digital lives, I highly recommend you take a listen to this episode of Media Hacks. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #262.

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #56

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 Tau Manifesto - Michael Hartl . "Pi is wrong. Okay, not really; it's just overcomplicated. Like saying 'four halves' when you could just say 'two.' At least, that's what Michael Hartl claims. He argues that we should use 2 pi, or Tau, instead, and that many equations become cleaner and more elegant. He even has a song to prove it (which is strangely, hauntingly beautiful in its repetition without repetition). I missed Tau Day (6/28), but this is still worth reading." (Alistair for Hugh).

Google's War on Nonsense - The New York Times . "Content farms want to harvest the world's information and display it as their own, hoping to gain traffic and visitors. That's bad for Google, which tries to decide what content is best - but doesn't want to be tricked into eating the empty calories of such farms. This New York Times piece looks at the arms race between content farmers and Google's search engine teams, and Google's latest weapon: an algorithm that can discern crap. Can automated book reviews be far off?" (Alistair for Mitch).

The AAA bubble - The Financial Times . "If I read this frightening graph right, it shows that the last huge crash was caused by a giant bubble in Asset Backed Securities - the bonds that were made up of subprime mortgages. That bubble bursting caused all sorts of fallouts, but one result was that we decreased our investments in ABSs, and shifted investments over to Sovereign Debt (i.e. lending money to governments). But that's basically just shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic, and it looks like that Sovereign Debt is likely to go bust as well (see: Greece, Italy?, Portugal?, Spain?... not to mention the USA). Fun times ahead." (Hugh for Alistair).

Hats off to the winners of the inaugural Google Science Fair - The Official Google Blog . "All three of us have daughters. So, I suspect that all of us will smile at the news that the three winners of the Google Science Fair are girls." (Hugh for Mitch).

The Start-Up of You - The New York Times . "This opinion piece by Thomas L. Friedman (author of The World Is Flat , etc...) in The New York Times inspired an entire Blog post for me this week (see: Perpetual Start-Up ). I don't think I realized that in a world where anyone can start their own business, it also means that the expectations of both employees and some of the biggest employers must change. Check out this line from Friedman's article: ' Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here's what's scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don't employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they're all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.' It's fun to look at new businesses like lean start-ups, etc... but we also have to think deeply about what it does to change the landscape of business, employment and everyday people." (Mitch for Alistair).

The News Industry Debate - The Economist . "The Economist pulls together two of the world's most interesting media thinkers (Jay Rosen and Nicholas Carr) to debate this question: Does the Internet make journalism better or worse? Not only is there some lively back and forth, but the comments are also hot and bothered. Couple that with the interactivity that this online exclusive offers, and you can also start to see how traditional publishers can take news items and make them more interesting online over print... even when it is just text." (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.

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