Dave Winer has turned his attention to making mobile content easier to deal with. If you are the kind of person who’s always reading websites on a mobile device and curse the slow load times, complete lack of formatting, and other problems, you’ll want to save a few of these bookmarks on your phone.
Check out NYTimes, BBC and TechCrunch in Dave’s new, stripped down format. I’ve been reading TechCrunch this way on my phone for a couple of weeks. Most of the graphics and (sniff) all of the advertising is stripped out, but at least it keeps the reader sane.
Dave isn’t the first to create mobile versions of websites. Winksite, Skweezer and Google, among others, have their own products. Skweezer is particularly cool because it converts any website on the fly. And in some ways its better than Dave’s sites because it also shows comments on a blog, and throws in the advertising, but at the very bottom. This is important to keep the site owners happy and also to make sure you aren’t violating copyright laws.
But if you want to just store a couple of quick bookmarks for a daily read, Dave’s solution may be right for you. See Om Malik’s thoughts on this as well.
And tomorrow look for him to announce a new mobile blogging tool called YoMoBlog. Go to the site, type in your blog credentials and create a quick post on the fly. All of the major blogging platforms offer the ability to post on a blog via a unique email address…but if you are on a smaller platform this might be a good tool for you to use.
As usual with Dave, his first iterations are just tangible reflections of his imagination. He builds and launches software fast, then goes back and fills in the holes. Look for these tools to evolve as well, and hopefully stay on the right side of copyright law.