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Street photographer Anton Kawasaki posts his thoughts on mobile photography, and what it means to him. This is a fascinating read, illustrated with beautiful photographs - all taken on a smartphone. "I started to play around with my own phone’s camera, began to like what I was producing (others did too), and suddenly I was hooked! Growing up surrounded by the film industry, and also working in comics for so long, definitely helped me in developing an eye for visual storytelling. And shooting non-stop with an iPhone for the last 5 years has really made me adapt to the device’s strengths and weaknesses."
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In the End Was the Word and the Word Was the Sponsor's — BuzzMachine
This speaks to me. Every time I see a news organisation try to ape Buzzfeed or Mashable slideshows I get angry. It undermines the point of having an editorial digital team that can create news content, in my opinion. If you want a team that builds slideshows of lolcats, put them on the marketing budget. "News organizations should not treat people as a mass now that they — like Google, Amazon, and Facebook — can learn to serve them as individuals. Can’t the same be said of the brands that are now rushing to make content? They’re listening to too many tweeted media aphorisms: that content is king, that brands are media. Bull. A brand is a relationship. It signifies trust and value. Advertising and public relations disintermediated the relationship that commercial enterprises used to have with customers over the cracker barrel. Mass media helped them bring scale to marketing. But now the net enables brands to return to having direct relationships with customers. That’s what we see happening on Twitter. Smart companies are using it not to make content but to talk one-on-one with customers."
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The Quality of Offline and Online Friendships - The Machine Starts
Why the friendships we build online are as meaningful and important as any other. A good read, and a good link to send anyone who thinks social media is a little hollow. "Technology can be bad for us, but it can also be very good for specific things. We create frustration for ourselves when we are tricked by technology into thinking it can solve all of our problems in the same way. It can't. But it can likely help us solve problems and foster friendships in different ways, though even then it is only one aspect of the three-dimensional, physical and virtual space we inhabit and should be used proportionately. We seem to always make the mistake of condemning the internet for not allowing us to achieve the same satisfaction that we get from face-to-face relationships in half the time. How churlish. The internet is once again our digital scapegoat. Friendships, like Aristotle's "slow-ripening fruit" remain valuable because of the time and presence we invest in them. "
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Read Me! Glorious Feature Design and the Future of Digital Journalism - The Machine Starts
"For too long some mainstream newspapers and magazines have treated their websites as dumping grounds for the text and thumbnail images associated with their articles. That or, worse, they kept the "web edition" sparse, merely uploading blogs and short pieces as a sort of useless teaser for the print version. New design concepts on the block may, at last, be provoking a rethink. Personally I don't believe in paywalls or a future of digital publishing which ignores long form writing. I think we're way past the legitimacy of either option, to be honest. That's partly because there are already publications proving, by virtue of their profitability, that special feature design is what online journalism has to do next. The trick, of course, is doing it in the right way - and at the right cost."
Sunday 2 June 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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