Welcome to 27th edition of The Three Things, the weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss from Michael Schechter (Honora, A Better Mess), Howie Goldfarb (Sky Pulse Media), and me!
For those of you new to this series, The Three Things arrives in your inbox on Sunday mornings (unless you don’t suscribe, but that can easily be fixed if you hurry over and enter your email address or add to your RSS feed) so you have some extra time to spend perusing the obscure content we’ve curated for you (and one another) before your week begins and deadlines, meetings, and work takes over.
This week we have thoughts on passion projects, democracy, and drama behind the scenes at a popular morning show.
I am taking a blogging vacation (read: Not blogging, not vacationing so I can write blog posts) so Lindsay Bell is going to take over for me while I’m out. She’ll have fun links for you to peruse and I’ll see you back here on April 28.
Patrick Rhone on Challenges and Success
Michael on Career Paths. This week, two of my favorite thinkers – Patrick Rhone and Brett Terpstra – got together to record an episode of Brett’s always excellent Systematic Podcast. Like any good episode of Systematic, they cover a lot of ground, but I was particularly taken by Patrick’s comments on the arc of his career. While I was late to realize my writing ambitions, I connected with the way he “became a writer by way of technology by way of being a writer.” It certainly touches on my own emerging experience of looking for better ways to go about my work only to discover my own fascination about the ways we go about improving.
I need to expand on this at some point, but Patrick touches on a growing interest of mine that relates to what we do, what we care about, and what happens when they collide. That, no matter what we do to make our living, it can be shaped by our fascinations. That, when we allow our unrelated personal fascinations to infuse our work (and vice-versa), it can lead our life in unexpected directions. It’s also just a great conversation between two guys who I admire greatly.
I Never Wanted to Take Your Guns Away
Howie on Google Search. Or how a little Google will do you. Allow me to explain…
Jim Carrey did a spoof on Funny or Die, which I found through a Google search after reading this on Huffington Post. Then I thought maybe Carrey is small fry against the NRA and FOX News. But if those people had Googled, they would find he has 10 million Twitter followers versus only two and a half million for FOX News and 145,000 for the NRA.
They’d also find FOX News has more than one million viewers watching at any given time and the NRA has more than four million members, which means they have one tenth the fans of Jim Carrey. How many times do I have to say ‘a little Google would do ya’? Heck, even a Yahoo Search would have helped!
As Web Search Goes Mobile, Google Loses its Edge
Gini on Mobile Search. Because of all the writing I do every day, I spend a lot of time studying Google, search engine optimization, and other things that will help us continue to grow through content. That’s why I found this New York Times article so interesting. No longer do we go to the web on our phones and tablets to find something; we go to an app. Yelp if we need a restaurant recommendation, Amazon for goods, books, and wares, Apple to bypass the counter register, and the WeatherBug to see if what kind of wind is facing a bike ride. Soon the day of link building and first page results will be gone. Are you ready?
Now it’s your turn. Is there a podcast, video, book, or article you think we need to see?