(2006-08-22) Winer Mobile News Reading

Dave Winer is loving using his Blackberry to read websites. He's depending on an Always On Network.

Has he played with a Data Synch approach, where you suck a pile of stuff down with your PC (via RssAggregator?) and then squirt it into your Mobile for later Off-Line reading? (Of course, then you can't blog about it as you read, which is a major pain. Print to paper at least makes it simple to highlight something you want to blog later.)

• I just tried that this morning. I picked my "B list" from Blog Lines, which had 300+ unread posts, then saved that frame to an HTML file, then did synch to Sharp Zaurus, and read them in Just Reader.

He notes that the direct-browsing if far simpler, thus more readily adopted (Adoption Life Cycle).

And he's doing some blogging from his Blackberry also.

What I just realized is that he's now generating Mobile-friendly pages (separate page per source/channel) with his servers, so that he can read them on his Blackberry.

• Each item on a page is just a brief summary and link to the original-source article on that original site (which depends on that site having a Mobile-friendly version that's easy to link to, possibly raises login issues, etc.).

  • It sounds like some publishers, even if they have a Mobile-friendly listing page, link for the whole article to an overly fat page. Whereas Dave is linking to the Print version. Note this often lacks Advertising, which returns to the Business Models For Information issue.

• Isn't he sliding toward re-creating web-based RssAggregator-s, though with more Mobile-friendly interfaces? (Blog Lines uses lots of screen real-estate for frames. I don't know whether they have a different skin available. Google Reader has a Mobile interface.)

  • Or maybe Dave's model makes more sense for news sites, where you get a taste via fast-scanning headlines, then you only read the full story for the few you're interested in. This might be harder for blogs, where you have lots of shorter bits..