Mobitopia - Tuesday, August 12, 2003
There's an interesting article on The Failure and Future of Mobile Content in Brighthand by Ted Ladd, in which he describes four popular myths about why he thinks it's failed so far, and where it's going in the future -
The "myths" are:
1. It's a technical problem
2. It's a management problem
3. It's an economics problem, or no cash post-crash
4. It's a bad experience
Now I'd argue with calling most of those myths, but the second half of the article is more interesting. Here he discusses the future of mobile content and describes four generations of mobile content
A breakdown of these generations is reasonably straightforward; the first generation was about trying to reproduce existing web information in a more managable format for smaller screens and limited input capabilities; the second is about using mobile devices as glorified pagers to alert people to content that could only easily be accessible from a desktop; the third is generating mobile specific information, things that are only really relevant to a mobile environment; and the fourth being where the difference between mobile and other environments has for the most part dissappeared.
What's going to help moving to the next generation?
One way that this conundrum might be resolved is to use proper semantic markup, XHTML and RDF for the content and CSS for the presentation layer. Danny Ayers has an example of how this approach would be useful for complex queries here, his example is "has anyone Dan Brickley knows blogged about IM recently?" This is the sort of query that'd be possible to evaluate manually but a nightmare programatically unless one had decent semantic data to work with.
And that Ladies and Gnetlemen is the magic of links. This being a human one that I kind of knew but hadn't made. Although RDF could be used by machines, it can also be used by other devices to communicate more effectively with humans...
Posted by Paul Goodison at August 13, 2003 09:18 AM | TrackBack