Day: September 21, 2004

Thanks to Jeff Veen for catching the most outrageous line of tonight’s Online News Association meeting. I could barely believe my ears. Just how much wine was consumed prior to this one?

Separately, Jeff voiced a telling comparison: Orkut and LinkedIn are like high-school yearbooks. You get everyone to sign it, and then you put it on the shelf. They don’t do anything. Amen. I also learned about Upcoming.org, which I had somehow never seen/heard of. I guess not getting out much means I don’t have a lot of use for a collaborative event calendar, but it’s still nifty bottoms-up stuff.

I use a boring cellphone. That’s OK, but I am interested in a few features of more modern phones, specifically a camera and a web browser. My biggest fear, though, is the service plan which will be required to keep the data charges economical: it’s almost certain to be out of whack with what I pay now, and what I need (I don’t use my cellphone all that often). Still, the time will come for the (small) leap forward, and one reason is the ability to scan feeds and/or sites in downtime. In other words, content.

I used to use AvantGo on a Palm V, but when I got a Blackberry a few years ago, I stopped carrying the Palm because e-mail on the ‘Berry trumped cached browsing of the News.com channel, among others. Pockets are only so big. But I miss having things to read for those odd minutes that are forced upon you.

So I think things like the coming CNET Mobile Feed Reader, a BREW app, powered by FeedBurner will find an audience. I also know News.com Mobile, the XHTML version of the site formatted for small screens, will be more useful to me then. Maybe I’ll try WinkSite, which has this entry on reading RSS feeds from your phone. Never heard of WinkSite until Scoble mentioned it. I expect once I make the jump to a modern phone with a service plan that doesn’t hammer me for actually using the services, I’ll pay more attention to these kinds of offerings.