It was an unusually busy week, mostly because of the preparations for our Mobilize conference next week. In addition, there were many events to be attended. Not surprisingly, all that activity ate into my reading time. But still, I did get enough time to put together this list, though I wish I had even more topic variety.

• This is how a Helsingin Sanomat journalist tried to save Nokia: Amazing story of how a journalist’s email led Nokia to wake up from its stupor five years ago. Clearly, it didn’t work.
• Whither the page view apocalypse: Brian Abelson launches a well-pointed critique of the page view driven web and how to overcome it. Fantastic reading.
• This isn’t Jonathan Franzen’s world anymore: Tim Carmody writes a critique of best selling author Franzen’s Guardian piece, What’s wrong with the modern world.
• When a crop becomes king: Best selling author Michael Pollan on corn. This is a vintage article — from 2002 and it is a great read, because I have always been fascinated by corn and the role it plays in modern society.
• The Senegalese roots of Southern cooking: I wish I could eat Southern food, but I can’t, due to health reasons. So I do the next best thing: read about it.
• There’s a .00006% Chance of Building a Billion Dollar Company: How This Man Did It: The story of David Friedberg, the founder of The Climate Company that was acquired by Monsanto for about a billion dollars.
• Modern Miners: The genomic gold rush: The title says it all, but in case you were wondering this is a piece that explores the opportunities that are opening up with the decoding of genome and the cloud.

And now a personal message: I am hosting GigaOM RoadMap, an experience design conference with Katie Fehrenbacher on November 5th and 6th in San Francisco. I would love for you to join the two of us and we’ll have experts like Jack Dorsey (of Square and Twitter) and Kevin Systrom along with many more speakers tell us the role of design in our increasingly digital society. For details, visit the conference website.