walkasaur.us

I just officially announced the new RC mobile websites over on the RC for Senate weblog.

I built the iPhone version (which should run fine on Google Android’s browser & Palm’s WebOS browser) using jQtouch. I also posted a slimmed down version for the modern BlackBerry browser (and I included Opera in the auto-redirect for that one).

The Blackberry version also nicely degrades on older browsers. I’ve seen some people with brand new Blackberry’s running outdated versions of the browser.

And for the rest of the mobile web (read:non-existent) there’s a text-based version of the site

I have been idly following the back & forth going on between Google (and, to a lesser extent, other search engines) and the “newspaper” (read: journalism) industry. I saw this in an article this morning on Newsvine:

Yet some publishers don’t see Google as an ally. They contend Google’s prosperity depends partly on its search engine’s ability to show capsules of newspaper stories and photographs, without paying for the privilege.

Or they complain that the Web surfers who come to newspaper sites from Google’s search engine often just read one story and then leave.

“A lot of it is just `fly-by’ traffic,” said The Dallas Morning News Publisher James Moroney. “It not the kind of online relationship I am looking for. I want people who are going to come to our site multiple times a month.”

I think this skirts the main issue with these sites. They are, by and large, terribly unusable from the reader’s point of view.

Why would a reader become more than a “fly-by” reader when the overall experience of news discovery is handled more effectively on another site’s application?

Generally, the “framing” of an article on most news web sites is cluttered. This clutter & poor information architecture cause users to have a hard time answering some of the most important navigation questions that a they can pose:

• Where am I?
• Where have I been?
• Where can I go?

The recklessness with which these sites throw their framing together causes people to then default to these answers:

• Some nows site.
• Google News
• “I can hit the back button.”

Newspapers cease to think that they can convert “fly-by” readers to long-time readers without a drastic change in the expectations they hold for their own websites.

ReadWriteWeb reports on Brand in Hand’s study of mobile application ads and finds that women are too busy using the apps to interact with ads.

They propose, instead, launching purpose-built apps for clients (like recipes that incorporate Kraft products for Kraft foods).

A more detailed article at AdAge.