Archives for category: Mobile/Tablet

Ryan Sholin at Invisible Inked is looking for bright spots that redefine news.

He’s started a list that shows some creative Web executions. Several commenters have added sites of their own. For example:

What I find interesting is that most of the examples on Ryan’s page are from newspapers. Other organizations (NPR, anyone?) must be doing interesting things as well. C’mon, represent!

If you’ve got redefining work of your own, feel free to show it off here in comments, and let Ryan know.

Mobile is the next big thing for news organizations, but not everyone has the time or manpower needed to create a site that looks good and works on all, or at least most, phones.

Google to the rescue.

DownloadSquad points out that anyone with an RSS feed can create a link for Google Reader’s mobile site by adding the feed URL to the prefix:

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/

For example,
http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/cw-ricochet
will create a live RSS link that goes straight go GReader. Try it here.

Its not foolproof, but it does appear to work for Feedburner URLs.

A similar workaround may be available for Yahoo!Go, Yahoo’s mobile application, but I haven’t found one yet. Hints or pointers would be appreciated.

The Times Online has a new ad campaign touting its revamped mobile site.

I pointed my cell phone browser to www.timesmobile.mobi, but so far I’m not impressed. It’s just one clickable banner ad at the top plus a list of links and linked headlines and a few fingernail-sized photos. (Ooo. “Fingernails.” Perhaps I’m coining a new term here for supersmall graphics.)

Somehow, I was expecting a richer experience, story summaries under the linked heds at least. A link to weather, traffic, sports and games. (Admittedly, at the bottom of the page there’s a link to the football, er, soccer page.) And since so many Internet-enabled phones can play sound, how about some audio?

I’ll check back in another week or so to see if perhaps I visited too early. In any case, the site could be better.

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter announced it has partnered with Nokia to launch the world’s first newspaper phone.

The device, known as DN-Mobilen, is a Nokia 6120 classic 3G running the Symbian OS. Subscribers pay $31 a month for a calling plan and unlimited access to the newspaper’s website.

Though Europe is ahead of the U.S. in cell phone use, it lags behind Asia, and therefore presents a huge opportunity for media companies that can develop an easy-to-use tool for readers. At least that’s the thinking.

An experiment in group fiction via Twitter launched today when 140 writers answered the call to join Cameron Reilly in writing a story called The Darkness Inside.

The idea is pretty simple: All writers follow @twittories. Reilly, as editor, lets each writer know when it’s their turn to add up to 140 characters of storyline and posts the entries to the website. (He also reserves the right not to post anything deemed illegal in his home country of Australia.)

The Twittories example could be a neat if inefficient and legal pitfall-filled way to draft a breaking news story for a topic of interest to a large community, such as the San Diego wildfires that broke out earlier this year.

In a time when the public is asking for transparency while clamoring for speed, this could be a daring approach to posting breaking news from the field online.

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