Sorry for the slight delay in sending out this week’s newsletter. I am traveling to Porto, Portugal for a few days, visiting Veniam for our board meeting. It is a short trip, which means lot of time on the plane. Time on planes is good for clearing out one’s Pocket queue, but hard for one to stay connected to the Interner without paying through the nose. Here are my seven picks for the week: 

  • The Elephant in the Room: A veteran web designer  points out that the business of design is changing, not necessarily for good. Agencies are vanishing and the work is drying up. Interesting points, since as an outsider it seems designers are at a premium in the valley. My guess: designers who don’t know data and code will become less relevant in the future. [Sarah Parmenter]
  • Impersonating a doctor is hard. Impersonating a healer, not so much: And that is why their numbers are rising and posing a big health risk. [Stat]
  • The viral publishing game is over: Now what? I would suspect a lot of handwringing and air seeping out of new new media valuations. [Gabriel Stein]
  • Open to Inspection: Life, Liberty and pursuit of happiness in the age of surveillance. A classic Lewis Lapham essay that you should read, save and share with everyone. Brilliant. [Lapham’s Quarterly]
  • Why are a lot of people losing their long distance vision?: Good question. And some explaination from Sarah Zhang [Wired]
  • Beyond the box office – The Pride of the Yankees: Great story about the 1942 movie about Lou Gehrig and how it was made. Total film nerd heaven. Right in time for the baseball season. [Matthias Ellis]
  • Reporting on life, death and corruption in Southeast Asia: Thomas Fuller of the New York Times says good bye to the region before taking over at the San Francisco bureau chief for the paper. Solid piece and surprisingly personal and human, a quality not associated with the Times. [NYT]

Here are what I wrote this week: 

This was a slow week due to work related time pressures and hopefully I will get a chance to write more this coming week. 

Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. More....