How to Photograph an Apple Product

The Verge recently interviewed Peter Belanger, the product photographer behind some of the more well-known Apple product images. In the interview, he describes the unique process of photographing Apple products:

We start by getting the position of the product and then move forward on lighting. Because Apple products have such carefully selected materials it is incredibly important to light the product in a way that will showcase the various materials accurately. I pick an area to start with and think about how that material needs to be described. Once that section is done I move on to the next. This is how my sets get so complicated!

Read the full interview on The Verge.

The New York Times Has a Clever Trick For Correcting Itself on Twitter

Like most reputable publications, The New York Times is diligent about issuing corrections at the bottom of articles in print and online, but what about on Twitter? As it turns out, the Times has a clever trick for correcting mistakes on Twitter in a way that should travel along with the original tweet and reach a wider audience.

The Times’ social media editor Lexi Mainland explained it in a back-and-forth conversation with Mark S. Luckie, Twitter’s manager of journalism & news:

How Samsung Cracked Down on Bad Products

From an excellent feature in Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

In 1995, Chairman Lee was dismayed to learn that cell phones he gave as New Year’s gifts were found to be inoperable. He directed underlings to assemble a pile of 150,000 devices in a field outside the Gumi factory. More than 2,000 staff members gathered around the pile. Then it was set on fire. When the flames died down, bulldozers razed whatever was remaining. “If you continue to make poor-quality products like these,” Lee Keon Hyok recalls the chairman saying, “I’ll come back and do the same thing.”

The lesson stuck. In May 2012, three weeks before the new Galaxy S III was to be shipped, a Samsung customer told the company that the back covers for the smartphone looked cheaper than the demo models shown to clients earlier. “He was right,” says DJ Lee, the marketing chief of Samsung Mobile. “The grain wasn’t as fine on the later models.” There were 100,000 covers in the warehouse with the inferior design, as well as shipments of the assembled devices waiting at airports. This time, there would be no bonfire—all 100,000 covers, as well as those on the units at the airports, were scrapped and replaced.

The Problem With Social News Feeds Replacing RSS Feeds Like Google Reader

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The most that I ever used Google Reader was the day after Google announced its decision to kill the service off. I’ve set up a few RSS feeds here and there, but I usually just check a roster of websites and company pages manually each day. Old fashioned, I know. That’s why I’ve generally refrained from commenting on the death of Reader.

But in the past day or so, I’ve noticed a few people I greatly respect put out an idea that troubles me: That Google Reader — and perhaps RSS feeds in general — are no longer as useful or necessary as the many social news services that have launched in recent years. Mathew Ingram at Gigaom summed up this viewpoint in a piece yesterday: 

For me, socially-powered news from Twitter and other services like Prismatic has not only taken the place of my feed reader but improved on it.

I certainly agree with Ingram in practice here (though I prefer Zite to Prismatic, personally). I live on Twitter all day long and use it to find much of the news that I read and write about. Ingram rightly touts the power of the social web to surface stories you might otherwise miss and to “attach meaning” to those stories based on who and how many people are sharing it. It’s the latter point though that troubles me on a philosophical level.

Though Ingram doesn’t say it in his piece, I would argue that a big part of the meaning attached to a story shared through a social news platform isn’t just who is posting and re-posting it, but what they’re saying and how they’re framing it. Suddenly, before you even open up the story, you have a take on that story. That comment functions like a new headline and lede for the story. It offers an opinion, or pre-selects what the person considers to be the most important fact. You might end up disagreeing with that take, but it still frames your initial reaction to the article being shared.

Even if articles are shared without commentary — whether on Twitter or Prismatic — this is a concern. Despite what virtually every journalist writes in their Twitter bio, when you share or re-post an article it is an endorsement — not an endorsement that you think the story or viewpoint is right, but an endorsement that it is worthwhile. This is really the “meaning” attached to stories that Ingram refers to. But this too shapes your first impression of a story before you even start reading it. That social meta data says, ‘This story is important. It must be because these people are talking about it.’

For someone like Ingram, who covers the media and in turn the conversation around media, I’m sure this can be incredibly helpful. But in my experience as a business reporter, I’ve found it can distort the significance and meaning of particular articles and blog posts. I have no doubt that discerning readers and reporters can filter through that extra feedback, but my point is simply that social news creates additional layers of meaning that readers need to filter through.

All of which brings me back to what I see as the real value of Google Reader and the RSS feed in general: It serves as a more traditional news wire that provides a stream of headlines and nothing else. It is unadulterated news at a time when more and more news comes served up with filters and feedback.

With tools like Google Reader, you can judge for yourself which stories are important and what the meaning of the story is. It’s not that it needs to be an either/or — social news or anti-social news — but as we champion the success of social news feeds, I think it’s important that we continue to highlight the importance of consuming content through these other channels as well, whether it’s an RSS feed or just a selection of online publications.

This gives the reader more room to come up with their own take. And from a reporter’s perspective, I’ll just say that many of the best articles I’ve written and the best posts I’ve shared on social networks are based on precisely those stories that no one else is talking about yet. 

Image courtesy of Flickr, Mobile Technology in TAFE

Why Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo’s $1 Billion Offer to Buy Facebook

Even at age 22, Zuck knew exactly what he wanted:

[Peter] Thiel recalled Zuckerberg said, in a nutshell: “I don’t know what I could do with the money. I’d just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have.”

Read the full story at Inc

The Paradox of Being a Writer in the Internet Age

From The New Yorker’s write up on Philip Roth turning 80:

“Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped: anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches. It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a professional writer.”

Andrew Mason Reveals What Really Bothered Him About Running a Public Company

In Mason’s last interview before getting fired from Groupon this week, the former CEO offered a candid response to what really bothered him about running a public company:

What’s just depressing to me is how—and it’s not just for us, let me generalize it—the moment a company goes public the conversation shifts from how they’re trying to change the world and the product they’re building to how they’re making money.

All the coverage around Facebook’s new search tool was, a little bit about the feature and then it gets immediately into how the market is reacting to it. Like, who the fuck cares?

If you look at a lot of the issues we’ve had since going public, it feels like we’re at Wimbledon and we just keep on double faulting. It’s like we don’t even get to play the match.

Read the rest of the interview at Fast Company

How Google Determines What’s News

Based on a patent application from last February:

The metrics cited in the patent application include: the number of articles produced by a news organization during a given time period; the average length of an article from a news source; and the importance of coverage from the news source.

Other metrics include a breaking news score, usage patterns, human opinion, circulation statistics and the size of the staff associated with a particular news operation.

Also factored in are the number of news bureaus a news source has, the number of original named entities used in stories, breadth of coverage, international diversity and even writing style.

Computerworld via SAI

Richard Dawkins Explains How to Find “Evidence” That Someone Loves You

From a lovely letter evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins sent to his 10-year old daughter explaining how to spot “evidence” for love:

“There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.”

Via Brainpickings.org