mDog: Better Treo Mobile News & Information
The issue of mobile news and information has been on my mind for some time because the fact remains that there are still too few “Treo-optimized” websites available.
A case in point is actually the mobile version of the Treonauts blog. Until now the best solution that we had found to provide you with a decent mobile reading experience was via Skweezer (see Skweeze Me Please) – a free web based service which automatically compresses and reformats any web pages and optimizes them for viewing on your Treo.
The only thing that Skweezer has been lacking though is a specific mobile optimization for blogs something which a new service called mDog now manages to do extremely well as you can see from this page of the Treonauts blog via mDog. The main difference is that mDog displays only the relevant content sections of the blog while Skweezer uses all of it.
mDog also provides a small mobile portal with many listings across twelve categories from News, Business, Weather and Technology. You can customize the portal – called “My Web” – by selecting your favourite destinations within the listings but (for now at least) you cannot add your own.
Additionally, with a section called “My Blogs” mDog not only allows you to bookmark up to five of your favourite blogs for easy optimized viewing but also (if you’re a blogger) to remotely login to your blog to post, edit or view comments. Supported platforms include Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress, Blog.com, AOL Journals, Livejournal and Xanga.
Coming back to the mobile version of the Treonauts blog we are now looking to get the links within our existing Mobile Digest (www.treonauts.com/mdigest.php) to use mDog so that we are finally able to deliver a completely optimized experience.
Separately, since I am on the subject of mobile news and information I am extremely curious to hear about just how many Treonauts regularly read news sites/blogs or access mobile information (such as weather or movie listings) with the Blazer browser on their Treo.
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Comments
why not use the rss reader QuickNews? I find that it works well with both Blazer and Skweezer to access full articles for news sites. With QuickNews, most blogs don't require that I use Blazer to access full postings (try Wonkette for example) and the information is all stored on the card.
Actually, Google has a pretty good mobile site optimizer as well (http://www.google.com/gwt/n). I use it to read treonauts on my Treo :-)
The problem with using an rss feed as the sole way to get information from a blog such as this is that you really don't get all the info. You only get what is posted in the main body of the blog, and none of the other info such as that in the forum or sale specials. I realize that not everyone wants all that info, but it would be something that those who would use it could miss.
http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en is a good way to load RSS and I agree Google is doing good optimization @ http://www.google.com/gwt/n. Blazer is OK but Xiino imho current favorite.
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