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Re: Thursday, August 24, 2006
Forgive me, but you appear to be conflating several different things: * presentation of web material on mobile device * the "River of News" metaphor * Dave Winer's invention The idea behind the first of these, i.e. "getting publishing in alignment with the needs of Web users with cell phones" is far from new. Like other aspects of web publishing, the best approach is not to use hacks like re-presenting feed data, but to present the original in a way that is appropriate for mobile devices. There is a raft of best practice documentation on this, the baseline being that the best way to achieve interop across devices is to respect the standards of the web: HTTP, HTML and so on. The River of News metaphor is marvellous, for the reasons you describe. But Dave Winer hasn't actually invented anything new here, and "He's coming at this as a publisher" - well, no he isn't. He's coming at it as a marketing man. There are two things being marketed, the lesser one being the mobile views, the big sell here is Dave Winer himself. However, as those links you made demonstrate, this is old material repackaged. There's nothing wrong with that, especially if it means increased awareness of of the potential of publishing to mobile devices. But the way this latest implementation works is not web-friendly either in a social or technical sense. It's coming from Winer's own domain for starters, possibly violating the publishing rights of NYT and co. Technically speaking, the web-friendly approach would be as mentioned above, to follow standards. If Dave can persuade NYT to use RSS, surely he can persuade them to use HTML properly. Except of course he would have little to gain from that. But even if you're looking at 3rd party sites, the specifications can be used to improve interop (e.g. here's your blog shown in another view by joining some web endpoints together, notably this one). I'm really beginning to wonder about the A-list/Silicon Valley types. Wait till they hear about the invention of the horseless carriage. There are responses to this message:
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