Weekly Links #2011.38

So let’s try something new here. I will share a couple of links that caught my attention during the week. To be a little different than other link post out there, I’ll try to post interesting stories of the week as well, but you’ll see. Here we go:

This week HP entered the race for the achievement award of the “Worst Board Ever”, which up till now was considered a secure win for Yahoo! While searching for the Yahoo! story, which was a while back, I realized that the award spin on this story isn’t that original; well anyways. I was impressed that no story had a ‘finally’ in their title, as Apotheker killed the PC business (in which HP was #1) and Palm/WebOS (which was, flaws aside, very promising). Oh and get this: for a little less than a year, he’ll take home $25 million. Failure is indeed good. In the same article, CNN’s David Goldman shows why HP’s board deserves the award more than Yahoo: they sacked a total of $83 million in their failed CEOs alone since 2005. Here is thought: next time, use that money and give your products a little more runway.

Journalistic integrity was on debate as well, as the outlets reach to questionable measures in order to find their profits. Ryan McCarthy at Reuters showed that mass-aggregation of primary sources and optimizing headlines for traffic grab is Business Insider’s way to profits. Marco Arment, who is often one of the primary sources, shares his opinion on BI as well — just to find his (negative) article on BI as well, at least for a few hours. That made me smile. Oh and on the topic of optimizing headlines for traffic, Alissa Walker at GOOD shares her thoughts about butchering content for traffic grab. I blame our ever shorter attention spans.

Trent Walton wrote and designed a nice little piece on unitasking vs. multitasking (yes he customizes the design for each article). Touch-Touch-Type-Swipe-Pinch-Touch-Type. Hey, gamification of the workplace is as easy as buying Macs for your staff. Oh yes, I forgot. That would be too much fun for the enterprise.

Everyone reading numerous “SEO” resources to make a fast buck, should really, really, really read Matt Gemmell’s piece SEO for Non-dicks, before trying something stupid. Really, it could save your sorry ass further down the road.

And finally a look at the past of Twitter via Kottke. If that really was their original homepage… sorry got to puke…

That’s all folks. Next week, we’ll likely see some Amazon tablet news.