The Midlands News Association is the latest publisher to embrace the mobile web with mobile-friendly sites for the Express & Star and Shropshire Star. The sites were built by the Midland News Association’s online arm MNA Digital with mobile technology partner Wapple, based in Bromsgrove. Particularly impressive is how easy it is for users to make comments - normally one of the most difficult acts when viewing on a mobile.
Dorien Aerts takes a look at Flemish newspapers’ mobile efforts.
What kind of mobile internet services do newspapers in Flanders offer? Since the launch of the iPhone in Belgium a few weeks ago, the mobile internet has become a hot topic. It has ‘a face’ since then, and more and more people want to try it out. Here’s what’s being done…
One of Belgium’s quality papers, De Standaard has offered a mobile website to its readers since the 16th of June viam.standaard.be.
The service contains all kinds of news, from sports and politics to celebrity updates. Apart from that, the mobile website offers the weather forecast and up to date traffic information. [Read more]
A while back I interviewed academic StephenQuinn, author of Knowledge Management in the Digital Newsroom, about using mobile phones for journalism, and the discussions he’s been having with news organisations about mobile technology. I filmed him on an N95, naturally. Here’s his response:
All you do is send an email to the address used by the service with the URL of the web page you want in the subject line. After a few minutes (they say) you receive the web page in HTML format in your email.
How is this useful? I can think of a number of ways: [Read more]
Here’s the good news for mobile phone websites: Vodafone has “seen a 50% rise in revenues from its data services over the past quarter, after the number of its customers using the web from mobile devices more than doubled.” [Read more]
This week’s ‘Something for the weekend’ is pretty straightforward: Mofuse is a service that instantly creates a mobile phone-friendly version of your site (or cellphone-friendly if you prefer). No registration required (although you’d be advised to) - you simply enter the URL of your site or RSS feed, and a stripped-down version is created, complete with .mobi extension. [Read more]
I’ve created a little service called ‘PodsForMobs’ which gathers links to podcasts and sends them via SMS using Twitter.
In other words if, like me, you like to listen to podcasts on your mobile phone and are frustrated by trying to find download links on podcast directories - or just want a little bit of serendipity - or have too little battery power to search, this works pretty well.
Belgian women’s magazine Flair has recently launched a mobile version of its product, writes Dorien Aerts.
How does it work?
Once you sign up you are sent a text message containing a link, from which you download a mobile application of Flair. When you start the mobile application, you find a very attractive interface (for girls at least) with fashion articles and information about events. [Read more]
Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom Wordpress or Blogger are still too fiddly.
Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool - as well as a great tool for blogging on the move. [Read more]
My live coverage of the Investigative Journalism Goes Global conference seemed to polarise opinion among the Twitterati. The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh and Charles Arthur, the BBC’s Bill Thompson, and Pete Ashton all unsubscribed from my updates - and those were just the ones I know about. [Read more]
Unless your site is entertainment or the wikipedia, your visitors are not dropping by to kill time. People visit websites to solve problems: they want to learn something new, check a fact, purchase a product, or accomplish some other goal. Visitors do not come to hear your point of view for its own sake (usually), enjoy the brilliance of your branding, or le […]
three suggestions that would improve the BBC experiment and increase the likelihood of coming up with something genuinely useful: 1. Share the wisdom. Don’t keep the ideas in-house, waiting for some designated day when you pick the best of the emails. Instead curate all the ideas and make them available online. Refining other people’s work - or tweaking […]
Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Thurs evening: More added now and more coming all the time. Check back if you haven't fo […]
In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of a blog called NightJack.
Imagine my surprise this evening when I happened upon the local evening paper to find there was a whole feature about Shire Oak Reservoir, complete with lead-in on the front page. The article was clearly derived from my earlier blog post, but bore no kind of reference whatsoever to the Brownhills Blog.
With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here's their answer.
MNA joins the rush to mobile news sites
