WapReview

It looks like VeloNews.com, the US based weekly print newspaper of competitive cycling has launched a proper mobile site. The URL is mobile.velonews.com and it seems to have replaced the old velonews.com/live_mobile site which carried live race reports from a half dozen or so of the bigest races each year but nothing else. The new VeloNews Mobile is updated constantly and mirrors the content of the Top Stories section of Velonews.com. One thing that's great about VeloNews Mobile is that the articles are full-length, the text of each story is the same as on VeloNews' full web site. That's the way I like it. There are lots of things that are different in the mobile context so it's not surprising that some publishers think they need to truncate and summarize text articles for mobile. I think that's wrong, I know I feel cheated when I read a cut down article on a mobile news site. Content is still king, even on mobile. Of course it's important to use pagination to keep page weight within the limits of the device's browser. That means less than 10KB if you are doing a one size fits all mobile site. But it's content that draws and hold users, including mobile users. There is loads of content on Mobile VeloNews; there are twenty headlines per page, each linking to a story, and seemingly infinite pages. I clicked Next a dozen times (that's 260 news items) and I was back in last summer's Tour de France and I still hadn't reached the end. More...