Wap Review

The mobile version of  Google News. There's also a "Touch Web" version at google.com/news/i The great thing about Google's mobile service is that the way it works is not only good for users but also benefits the mobile web as a whole.

The full-sized Google News site has been around for three years but only recently moved out of the public beta stage. Unlike most news portals which employ flesh and blood editors to select stories from the various wire services, other sites and now even from blogs, Google uses special search-based technology to determine what articles to include in News and which of those articles are timely enough and newsworthy enough to deserve placement on the start page. While there have been some isolated issues with tasteless or worse racist stories getting into Google New's results, Google News generally does a pretty good job of picking up on what's timely and newsworthy. Google News doesn't show the whole article but rather headlines and some teaser text from the article with a link back to the full story on the originating site.

I was eager to see how Google mobilized News. I expected to see a mobile front end on the "big" Google News with a mobile-friendly front page containing links to transcoded copies of the same stories that were featured on the big site. But that's not what Google has done. They are spidering news sites on the mobile web. So the stories on mobile Google News are all from mobile sites. It actually works very well and in doing so shows how mature the mobile web has become. When I checked, both sites had as their top story a piece about Bush's trip to India. The web site's story is from CNN while the mobile site's comes from the Baltimore Sun's mobile edition. Google seems to have no trouble filling the mobile news site with hundreds of stories. Admittedly the web version has many more (thousands) but there is more than anyone can possibly read on the mobile site. Best of all, by linking to mobile sites rather than transcoding full web sites Google is driving traffic to those mobile sites - which will help to make the mobile web grow.

Google News is actually drawing it's stories from sites using three different technologies; WAP1 sites using WML, WAP2 sites using xhtml-mp and PDA friendly HTML sites. Google links directly to the WAP1 and WAP2 sites but transcodes the PDA sites. I think this is a perfect solution. There are a lot of PDA sites out there, maybe even more PDA sites than WAP ones. The PDA sites are generally quite usable on even low end phones, but they can contain pages or images that are too large for a non-smartphone's browser to handle. The Google transcoder solves this problem by breaking long pages up into multiple smaller pages and re-scaling images to fit the phone's dimensions. The transcoder also deals with those annoying blocks of links that some PDA sites put at the top on the page before the real content. The link block works pretty well on a PDA where it only takes up at most 3 lines out of about 12 total lines - but on a tiny phone screen the links fill the entire first screen and sometimes the second. The Google transcoder collapses the link block down to a single line with a "+" link that will expand the block if you really need to get at the links. While I generally prefer a true mobile site to a transcoded version of a site designed for larger browsers, I really like how well Google's transcoder handles PDA sites - taking a page that is already mostly OK for mobile and making it into a great mobile page. Transcoding full size websites, on the other hand, is useful in that it can get you access to information you might not otherwise be able to view on your device, but it rarely gives as good a user experience as a site designed for mobile browsing in the first place.

The best thing about Google News isn't the front page of algorithmically selected top stories, it's the search. This is true of both the desktop and mobile versions. Enter a search string and you will get a page of links to news stories meeting your search criteria. And because it's a Google search, you can use most the advanced features of Google's search language. I've tried "OR", parentheses "+", and "site:" - they all work on Google News, including mobile.

The Mobile News site is WAP2 only, although many of the pages it links to are WML (wap1). I've created a link (below and on the News page of the yeswap.com portal) to Mobile News transcoded to WML.

Google doesn't translate the WML pages into HTML for the handheld browsers that don't support WML, like the Hiptop/Sidekick, PIE before Windows Mobile 2002, Palm Blazer before Version 4 or Palm Webpro. If that is a problem for you, Google suggests using the full version of Google News on your PDA browser but I suspect that wont't work very well with some of the above browsers.

I congratulate Google on a very nice mobile service that showcases the depth of content on today's mobile web.

Excellent site for National, International, Technical and Entertainment News. No Local News.

MSNBC, the cable TV news channel operated by Microsoft and NBC has a rather good mobile web site. There is no dedicated URL for the mobile site as far as I know, but if you go to MSNBC.com with almost any mobile browser, the site's browser detection kicks in to serve mobile pages. It's a typical multi section news portal much in the style of CNN's and the BBC's mobile sites. Unlike those two which use in house reporters extensively, much of MSNBC's content is from the wire services or other publishers like Business Week, Forbes and the National Geographic.

MSNBC has a much more content than you would think from looking at the front page which lists only nine sections (Business, Sports, U.S.News, World News, Politics, Tech & Science, Entertainment, Health, Travel). There are actually a number of additional mobile sections which are more or less hidden. When you click of a story about the situation in Palestine you find that story is part of a Middle East and North Africa page which has links to five other stories focused on that part of the world. The sports page currently has a link to only one NFL related article but when you follow that link you find yourself in an extensive NFL section with 15 more pro football articles. These hidden sections are especially evident in the business pages. I found dedicated Business Week, Forbes and Motley Fool sections.

I've discovered that the URL's of most of these hidden sections on MSNBC are persistent. They aren't memorable urls being distinguished from one another only a numeric id but they do consistently return a page with the same title but fresh content. An easy way to find these hidden MSNBC.com sections is to open the site in your PC browser. Most of the sections which don't show up in the mobile menu are listed in the left sidebar. Others show up in the top navigation bar when you open a story on the PC site. It turns out that the URL's on the PC site and the mobile site are the same - so if you open the Business Week link in the sidebar you will see that the url is www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032154/. If you enter that URL in a mobile browser you get a mobile formated version of the Business Week page. Not every PC page has a corresponding mobile version. None of the Multimedia pages have a mobile equivalent nor does the PC site's Formula One motor racing page. Still I'd say that 70% to 80% of MSNBC.com's content is available on mobile. Here are some the ones I've found.

• The best of Forbes.com msnbc.msn.com/id/3663445/ This has a completely different set of stories than Forbes own mobile site.
• Business Week msnbc.msn.com/id/3032154/
• Motley Fool msnbc.msn.com/id/7233210/ The Fool's own mobile site has been broken for a year so this is a nice find.
  
• The Financial Times msnbc.msn.com/id/3032240/
• Meet The Press msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/
• Access Hollywood msnbc.msn.com/id/7358550/
• NBA msnbc.msn.com/id/3032113/
• NFL msnbc.msn.com/id/3032875/
• College Basketball msnbc.msn.com/id/3152981/
• NASCAR msnbc.msn.com/id/3032830/

The MSNBC mobile pages are attractive and quite usable on most phones. Images are too wide at 170px for low end phones which generally have only 128px wide screens, but at least some mobile browsers can resize images to fit the phone screen. Opera Mini which runs on most phones resizes images too and handles MSNBC beautifully. Page weight is under the 10 KB markup limit of some browsers and pages have only a single image so markup plus images is under 20 KB as recommended by the W3C. Navigation is at the bottom of the page and uses access keys, another plus.

I don't know why MSNBC is hiding so much of their mobile content but I'll be adding links to all the hidden sections listed above and any others I find to the YesWAP.com mobile portal.

While it may have started as Arianna Huffington's blog, the HuffPost is now a major web news outlet with paid staff and constant updates covering breaking news.  The mobile edition by Crisp Wireless contains a selection of top stories from the full site

US TV network CBS does this mobile news site. Unfortunately the site is very slow to load.

Politico is a three year old, politics focused daily newspaper distributed for free in Washington D.C. Its widely read by politicians, lobbyists and other D.C. insiders. The paper's website, politico.com has significant national readership an Alexa US traffic ranking of 287.

The mobile version of Politico is at mobile.politico.com (first image). It was launched in December, 2007. Mobile devices visiting politico.com are not automatically redirected to the mobile version. However, iPhones and only iPhones visiting the mobile URL are redirected to a special "Touch Web" version that can be viewed with other browsers by using the URL mobile.politico.com/iphone/. The second image shows the iPhone edition in the Android browser. Both mobile variants average 40KB, excluding JavaScript which both use but do not require.

Politco's mobile editions are somewhat limited. They do include, with one exception, the full text and photos from all the articles and sections on the main site. The exception is Mike Allen's daily "Playbook" column arguably the most popular feature on Politico and thus a strange thing to omit for mobile. Other limitations of Politico mobile is the complete absence of reader comments and the removal of all hyperlinks, both internal and external from within news stories. Politco's stories get hundreds of comments with the discussions often as interesting as the original article, so it seems strange to not include them, even if only in read-only format. The same goes for links, Politco's stories are loaded with links, almost entirely internal ones to related articles and background importation. I don't understand why Politico would want to strip out the internal links, which help keep readers on the site, from the mobile edition.

I applaud Politico for recognizing the mobile web's potential and providing attractive, well organized mobile sites with lots of content. But I'm however disappointed by the "dumbing down" of the mobile versions by the removal of critical features like comments, links and Mike Allen's column. Source: Taptu State of The Mobile Touch Web Report (PDF)

The Associated Press, US wire service and supplier of stories to most online news sites, has launched its own mobile site.

AP seems to making a serious effort to compete with mobile news market leaders like Yahoo, BBC, CNN, The New York Times and Google, most of which are also AP customers.

The portal's design is similar to other mobile news sites, a front page of about a dozen headlines grouped under section headers like U.S. News, World News, Local News... The unique feature of the site is it's local coverage. The AP is a cooperative of over 1700 local newspapers which should make it a good source of local news. You can customize the mobile site's front page to display local news headlines for one or multiple US zipcodes. You choices are saved with a cookie, there's no need (and no way) to log on.

Mobile News Network comes in a regular mobile version and a special iPhone one. Browser detection is used to deliver the iPhone edition only to iPhones, which is too bad as their are other mobile browsers like Opera and WebKit that could easily display the iPhone sites's content except for the videos. The regular site has a very plain appearance with a minimum of formatting and no photos on the front page. More effort seems to have gone into the iPhone variant which has typical iPhone chrome and a thumbnail image for each headline. iPhone users also get videos in full 480x320 iPhone resolution and the ability to customize the homepage by hiding sections. Other than the videos, the news content seems to be identical in both versions.

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A well designed mobile site from the big international news service, Reuters. Many sections and features Including sports, business, global stock quotes, technology and entertainment. Stories are full length. The site services customized content (WAP1 or WAP2, images resized to fit the screen) based on browser capabilities. Some pages are, however too big (over 6KB) for most WAP1 phones - many of which can't handle over 2 KB.

Salon.com is a pioneer online news magazine. It was founded in 1995 at the beginning of the Internet boom and has always featured well written articles on news, politics, the arts and technology as well as book and movie reviews. Salon has struggled to survive economically and since 2001 has limited access to a portion of its content to paying subscribers only.

Salon is also a pioneer on the mobile web, launching a PDA edition in 2001. It was aimed at users of the Omnisky network for Palm OS PDA's. Omnisky, which started service in late in 1999 was an early data-only wireless network based around a battery powered modem which attached to Palm V and Vx PDA's and allowed users unlimited wireless access at up to 19.2 Kbps for around $50 per month. The technology was CPDP, an early protocol which allowed analog cellular providers to provide packet data service. Omnisky is long gone and most of the CPDP networks have been shut down - but Salon continues to maintain the Salon PDA site using the same layout and design that it's had since the beginning, now as an Avantgo site which is also available on a public URL.

It's actually a perfectly good design for a site like Salon which is mainly text anyway. There are quite a few similar cHtml PDA news sites originally designed for 160x160px PDA's which look good and have excellent usability on today's WAP2 phones. Nothing fancy, just a shallow cascading menu structure leading to individual articles. Salon's mobile site typically contains about 10 articles from the current issue.

I was surprised that Salon was using a mobile page design that was five years old but was pleased to find that old design still plays well on today's mobiles. If you are looking for something more modern, Salon now has a second mobile site designed for smartphone browsers at mobile.salon.com.  It contains about 200 articles with images and reader comments.

Full length stories from the newspaper. Includes stories from the News, Sports, Money, Life, Travel and Tech sections. markup errors prevent both the wml and xhtml versions of this site from loading on many older phones with Nokia and Openwave browsers.

Lots of long thorough stories from the TV network's news organization. Includes, Financial, Technology, Health and Movie News in addition to National and International.

The conservative US TV news network's mobile site.

Newsvine is a popular, user driven news site. It works a little like Digg in that stories are user submitted and voted on by members. But Newsvine is much mellower and more focused than Digg. The site's Code of Honor stresses respect for others, relevance and avoiding sensationalism. The code seems to be followed remarkably well making the site a fine online news source covering US and world news, sports, tech, business, health and entertainment. The site's front page has top stories from all topic areas and there are also 17 separate category pages which function as category specific front pages.

There are three kinds of stories on the Newsvine front page and topic specific pages;

• Wire service stories reproduced in their entirety on Newsvine.

• "Seeded" stories which user submitted (seeded) links to external sites. Seeded stories have a Newsvine launch page with a brief excerpt or synopsis by the user who submitted the story and then a link to the full story on the external site.

• Stories by Featured Writers which are user written stories published on Newsvine. These are a little like blog items with comments and the ability to read an archive of each writer's items.

The mobile edition of Newsvine does a good job of presenting all the content of the PC site in a format that is easy to understand and navigate on a mobile device. Category selection is handled by a dropdown at the top of the page. The three types of Newsvine stories are clearly marked and delimited. Which is a good thing for users on a metered data plan, or with browsers that can't handle full-web pages as the Read Article links on the Seeded story launch pages lead directly to full-web sites.

There are however a couple of small usability issues:

• Images on Newsvine.mobi are wider (250px) than most mobile device screens and will be truncated or resized by the browser. My phone's browser can resize images on the fly but pages with images needing resizing load and scroll much more slowly.

• If you go to Newsvine's PC site with a mobile browser there is code that is supposed to redirect to the .mobi site. Unfortunately the code is JavaScript which, except for high-end smartphones and Opera Mini, mobile browsers don't support. The redirection doesn't work on the browsers that need it most. Go directly to newsvine.mobi to always get the mobile version.

All in all, Newsvine.mobi is a great edition to the the mobile web news universe. I think it compares very well with mainstream mobile news sites like Yahoo, the BBC Google News and the NY Times in timeliness, relevance and article quality.

Mobile website of Current TV, the television news and entertainment channel started by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. A big (170 KB) site best suted to advanced devices it has news, technology, environmental, movie. music and comedy sections.  Many items include iPhone/Android formatted (mp4 480x320, 3MB) videos. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

National Public Radio, the US public radio network has a new mobile site. It's a general news site with politics, world, business, health and science news sections as well as music, book and movie reviews and feature stories. Most stories include a small photo. Instead of streaming audio, npr has a service where you can listen to broadcast clips by calling a special number. I'm sure the carriers prefer you to use voice minutes instead of unlimited data to listen! NPR's older text only site at thin.npr.org also works well on mobile browsers and does have streaming audio although only in Windows Media format.

A good news site with a misleading name. I was disappointed to find that "Earthtimes.org" is NOT about saving the planet. Instead this EarthTimes is a World News site with lots of mobile formated hard news. Sections for the US, UK and India.

Venerable (founded 1865) liberal US weekly news and politics magazine's mobile site offers the full text of over a dozen current articles from the print magazine and website.

Newsweek is Time magazine's major competitor among US weekly news magazines. Before the Internet and CNN these two publications held great power in influencing mainstream politics and thought in this country. Nowadays both are trying to reinvent themselves on the web - including the mobile web. I covered Time's new mobile site recently so here's a look at Newsweeks' mobile offering.

Newsweek, like Time, has turned to Crisp Wireless to create their mobile site. Crisp seems to specialize in repackaging web content, particularly news, for mobile use. Mobile.newsweek.com is a typical Crisp site with around 50 articles divided into sections. Numeric accelerator keys give one click access to sections and articles. Newsweek Mobile is afflicted with a bug I noted on several other Crisp sites. CSS styling is used to make selected links appear with reversed colors, white on red. Most mobile browsers ignore attempts to color links but the latest Openwave browser (Version 7 ) changes the foreground color to white while ignoring the CSS to make the background red so that the current link is rendered in unreadable white on white.

The Newsweek site is notable for including many of the magazine's well known columnists like Pulitzer prize winner Anna Quindland and well known tech writer Steven Levy (Insanely Great, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution).

Surprisingly, Newsweek doesn't really have it's own website. When you go to Newsweek.com you're redirected to a Newsweek section on MSNBC's site. If your using a mobile browser Newsweek.com redirects to a mobile version of the MSNBC Newsweek section. The Newsweek section within MSNBC's PC version is quite large with multiple news sections and over a hundred articles but the mobile edition is rather limited with only 12 stories linked from the start page. I'm rather surprised that Newsweek.com doesn't send mobile browsers to the new and much richer in content, mobile.Newsweek.com.

Text only edition of Nation Public Radio's website. Synopsizes of news stories and features from the US public broadcasting network. There are also audio clips which are in Windows Media Audio format probably only playable on Windows Mobile devices.

TIME was the first newsweekly magazine in the US and before the rise of the web diminished it's influence, being on the cover of TIME generated immediate nationwide celebrity or notoriety - the cover subjects weren't always the good guys. While not much attention is paid anymore to the weekly cover person, TIMEs annual Person of the Year still generates considerable buzz. TIME.com has been on the web since 1998 and it's current web edition is both very complete and attractively designed with many news photos. A unique feature of TIME.com is it's searchable web archive of every article published since the magazine's founding in 1923. Access to the archived articles is free and requires no registration unlike say the New York Times which charges for it's archives.

TIME finally has a mobile web edition (mobile.time.com) and it's another of the Crisp Wireless sites I mentioned in yesterday's AP Elections post. The site uses TIME's signature shade of red for the background of header text is generally both readable and attractive. Page (5KB) and image (102px wide) sizes are well within the limits of any WAP2 phone. The site contains the full text of 16 current articles from TIME.com. No access to the archives, unfortunately.

I did notice an interesting bug not only in TIME mobile but in most of the Crisp Wireless sites. With the latest Openwave V7 browser, links disappear when they have focus. You can see this in the images. The top image shows the link to "The Foley Scandal..." but when you scroll down to the link it's gone (second image). The culprit is the following CSS:
a:focus {
background: #cc0000;
color: #ffffff;
}
The intention is to reverse the selected link's colors to white on a red background. Unfortunately, the Openwave V7 browser ignores the background color change - but not the foreground one and you end up with the dreaded white text on a white background! This happens both on an actual Motorola i855 handset and with the OpenwaveV7 emulator. Coincidentally, Luca Passani's Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web which I recommended in a recent post warns against doing exactly this.

"Do not try to color links
...If adaptation is not an option, avoiding background images and colored links is the safest choice to make sure that content is usable across a wide array of devices. If no color info and no background are specified, devices will resort to default colors, which are typically very readable."

I tried TIME mobile on the other emulators I have and got better results. Openwave V6, Opera Mini and the Nokia Mobile Internet Toolkit 4.0 all ignored the CSS and rendered the links in the browser's default colors. The Motorola A835 MIB emulator actually got it right and colored the selected links white on red. So of the limited number of devices and emulators I have at hand only the Openwave V7 browser exhibited this bug. Still Openwave is a very popular browser, especially in the US. In addition, only the Motorola browser actually worked the way the site designer intended so I think Luca's advice is very sound for today's mobile handsets.

The background bug is mainly an annoyance and the site is still usable even on the Openwave browsers.

Emulator images courtesy Openwave Systems Inc. Openwave and the Openwave logo are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of Openwave Systems Inc. in various jurisdictions. All rights reserved.

Mobile news site from the US government's official international radio and TV broadcasting service. VOA Mobile is available in 21 languages and offers about 30 full length text news stories with photos and 12 five minute podcasts. Source: Mobility.mobi

Irreverent US politics blog - "Middle Web" site may be too large to load on feature phones.

A mobile friendly podcast series from the Intelligent Aboriginal News Service, Angry Indianradio covers the often under reported "Fourth World" of  indigenous and First Nations peoples as well as relevant social justice and political issues. Mobile View by Mobify

Mobile edition of Indian Country Today an award-winning weekly newspaper with news, information, and imagery relevant to the Indigenous people of the Americas. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

RedTram is a searchable automated news aggregator similar to Google News but less US centric. RedTram's front page covers top world news stories or you can click the "News on..." link for the Technology, Economics & Finance, Culture & Arts, State & Community, Incidents, Automotive and Sports sections. Users can comment on stories and there is a page of the most commented stories. All links in items are removed and there's is no way to get to the original news source. I like to see a way to click thorough to transcoded versions of the original articles or the possibility of emailing the a link to the source item..

Original Signal is a web aggregator that displays headlines from the feeds of about 15 preselected high traffic, high volume blogs and news sites sharing the same general topic area. Clicking a Headline takes to the source site's article transcoded by Google. The Original Signal News site draws from The BBC, Yahoo, The New York Times, etc.

MSNBC's mobile web companion to the NBC TV show "Meet the Press". Summaries of past Meet the Press Shows.

Matt Drudge's news site now has a mobile edition, Drudge is credited with many scoops including being the first to report former president Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. The Drudge PC site contains headlines, news photos and short comments followed by links to full stories on mostly mainstream news sites. The mobile version is the same except that images aren't displayed on the front page, replaced by links to them. When you click on a link that goes to an external news story your are warned that it's not optimized for mobile and given the option to email the link or follow it.

There is another mobile version (jongales.com/drudge/) of the Drudge Report, launched in 2004 by Jon Gales which uses screen scraping to grab and reformat the text and links of the PC site into something more mobile friendly. The new official site has much smaller page and is better suited for mainstream mobiles.

The original mobile Drudge report. Drudge is alternative look at the news emphasizing anti-establishment and bizarre stories. Has a reputation for scooping the majors on breaking news. This is an unofficial mobile version of the Drudge report that mobile developer Jon Gales created long before Drudge himself discovered the mobile web. The official Drudge site has smaller pages and works better on mainstream phones but Opera Mini users will prefer this one as it shows inline images rather than forcing you to click a link to see an image

Slate (mobile.slate.com) is an online news and lifestyle magazine originally owned by Microsoft but now the property of the Washington Post. Slate is quite similar to Salon.com in it's style and the type of articles it features. The mobile edition contains selected articles, features and columns from the full site . Although not the full Slate, the mobile version has quite a bit of content. There are 20 articles from today's coverage plus about the same number for each of the last 14 days in the mobile archive. Sadly, the Doonesbury comic strip - a feature of the PC edition is not available on mobile.

In depth stories with an anti-establishment emphases.

Mobile edition of a quarterly print magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute. Features well written,  in-depth articles on urban policy and planning. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile phones have had a huge effect on society by making interpersonal communication instant and always available. They are also becoming important tools for political and social change. Here are a few examples:

• Most of the reportage, both text and pictures, documenting the repression of the Tibetan Independence movement has come from camera phones and SMS eyewitnes accounts.
• Twitter proved it's value for emergency communications in use by police and fire departments and the Red Cross during last October's Southern California wildfires.
• Barak Obama's presidential campaign is using text messages to get out the vote and organize rallies. The candidate also has wallpapers and sound bite ring-tones for download by supporters. Hilary Clinton is using text messaging political organizing too.
• Zimbabwean workers in South Africa use mobile banking to send their money home to avoid having to pay bribes to border guards.
• In Nigeria, teenagers can get their questions about AIDS and safe sex answered by a free SMS service sponsored by the government and a consortium of agencies.

Some of these stories appeared in the mainstream press, but I heard about them first by reading MobileActive.org's blog. MobileActive's motto is "Mobile Phones for Civic Action". They do this by reporting and encouraging the use of mobile technology for the common good and by connecting non governmental political action organizations working in areas like human rights, democracy campaigns, environmental awareness and disaster relief with mobile technology and mobile technologists. Besides the blog, MobileActive's web site has a directory of current activist projects using mobile technology, another directory of tools and vendors supplying technology of interest to political action organizations, and a great database of global mobile usage statistics.

MobileActive is a must read for anyone interested in social change and mobile technology. And you can read it on the mobile web. The mobile edition of the MobileActive blog at mobileactive.mofuse.mobi is created from the site's RSS feed using Mofuse (review) and offers the full text of the ten most recent posts. Since my review, Mofuse has added Mowser integration which means that you can click through to a transcoded version of the full MobileActive blog to leave and read comments on items.

Mobile edition of a popular anti-Bush US Political Blog.

The Christian Science Monitor. is a leading independent international daily news paper which doesn't use wire services, almost every story is written by the WSJ's own reporters. Widely respected for it's journalistic quality, non-sensational reportingand international rather than nationalistic viewpoint.. Although owned by the quirky Church of Christ, Scientist, the Monitor doesn't preach religion although it rarely reports medical related news or anything critical to the religion.

The mobile version of this site at csmonitor.com/pda/avantgo.html has not been updated since 24-Jan-2007! The link at the top of this listing points to the text only edition of the CSM which is a little on the large side but should work on most phones and is updated several times a day.

This site aggregates news headlines from a number of sources including Reuters, The New York Times, Google News, Yahoo News and OMG. WordTube editors pick the best stories for inclusion on the WordTube Top News page. There are additional separate WordTube pages with top stores in Sport, Business, Opinion, Culture and Regional News.

"Citizen Journalism" news site carries live general and science news from member reporters and bloggers around the world.  The site shares advertising revenue with contributors.  Register on the PC site at digitaljournal.com in order to comment on articles and submit news items, photos and videos. Source: Mobility.mobi

PLANetizen is a Urban Planning and Design News site. News about new projects, conferences and planning issues. Extensive job listings for planning professionals mainly in the US.

Google has created this custom page of news and information on the 2008 US Presidential Election. The site features links to Google News filtered to show election news only, a preselected set of political and election feeds in Google Reader, links amd click to call numbers for local voter registration information, pre-populated Google searches for "Obama" and "McCain" and a selection of YouTube videos from the candidates