Dave Winer wants feedback on how mobile RSS readers can discover mobile friendly versions of article Web pages.
- http://www.scripting.com/2006/09/14.html#mobilefriendlyNews
- http://scripting.wordpress.com/2006/09/14/scripting-news-for-9142006/#comments
IMHO, targeting content to a mobile device is a bad idea. I would prefer the RSS publisher publish full content feeds, so that the reader doesn't have to escape the RSS reader to read the entire article. The problem then becomes, how to read comments and post comments to the blog entry. Joe Gregorio solved that problem 4 years ago with CommentAPI.
Publishers won't like this. They will respond, How do we make money? Put ads in your feed.
Good idea - on full feeds :)-
Bad idea - on ads in the feeds :)-
As it stand mobile devics have limited bandwidth and high latency..why overload the consumer in the verical of mobile with more ads ? right now, some of the feeds that I get have such ad,s it takes more time to load the ad, then to actual read the content..
Post/Read Comments would be a good thing.. I struggle with comment mngt via a handheld. Actually, I am restricted , as most apps dont have this feature
/pd
FeederReader for Windows Mobile devices implements the ability to post to CommentAPI (probably about 6-12 months ago). Combined with the ability to show comments or subscribe to comments also available in FeederReader, this is fairly powerful feature.
One resistance point for blog owners on implementing CommentAPI is spam. I've written a proposal on how to integrate CAPTCHAs into the CommentAPI, that would even work for blind users.
Ads are already embedded in some RSS feeds and take no more time to display than embedded images. FeederReader (and others) have the ability to cache images and displaying a text add is not very time consuming.
Greg Smith
Author, FeederReader - Windows Mobile news, blogs, audio, video, podcasts downloaded direct to your device
Peter,
Large publishers are not gonna do full-text feeds without embedded ads. Unless you have another suggestion on maintaining their bottom line (revenue), they are a necessity.
Randy
Randy