But I’ve been logging a lot of cool mobile stuff for CNN.com Tech. So here’s a quick list of what I’ve been covering there…

My picks for the most significant posts:

• March 4: Why Amazon would be smart to give away the Kindle. I read some posts advocating this move, so I pulled them together and added my own thoughts. This post attracted a surprising amount of attention — I’ll have to revisit it.
• March 16: Local news, information are going mobile big time, Pew survey says. This post didn’t get a ton of attention or comment, but because I’m a cofounder of Oakland Local, this topic was near and dear to me. This also presented an important opportunity to discuss the local impact of the mobile digital divide.
• April 5: Facebook reaching out to feature-phone users. Facebook’s upgrade and consolidation of its mobile web sites is its second recent major move to improve access and user experience for feature phone users. Smart strategy for this company. I explain why.
• March 28: BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet may face uphill battle. Oh yeah, this post brought me tremendous grief from BlackBerry fanboys and trolls. To be fair, I should have clarified that with this device, BlackBerry will debut the QNX operating system it just acquired. But this is targeted as a consumer device — and among consumers, the BlackBerry brand has a pretty bad rep for user experience. It’s a great brand for messaging-minded business users, but the consumer market is different. I think BlackBerry will have to do a hell of a lot of expensive marketing to communicate about the new OS and overcome that preconception. Furthermore, I expect that most consumers will misunderstand how the Playbook will really handle Android apps, and may end up feeling misled. We’ll see. I plan to talk to some developers of Android apps to see how eager they are to port to the Playbook.

My other recent CNN.com Tech posts:

• April 5: Boost Mobile scores highest among no-contract phone owners. I pay a fortune for my Verizon Droid Incredible plan, but when I bought it last summer there weren’t any good Android options on month-to-month no-contract plans. That’s starting to change, and when I upgrade my phone when this contract runs out, I’ll probably go this route. Useful to see how customers are rating these carriers.
• March 30: Android is the Windows of mobile platforms. I wrote this soon after my controversial BlackBerry Playbook post, so I was a bit fed up with tech fanboys and trolls. I’d been meaning to write this post for awhile, but I’ve gotta admit — I decided to go for it in part as a “bring it on!” to the tech trolls. But it attracted relatively civil comments and little criticism. The best laid plans…
• March 29: Mobile banking is booming, survey shows. I was especially intrigued by this finding: a quarter of smartphone users reported, “Accessing my account through my cell phone is too slow.” Yet only 9% of feature phone users had the same complaint! Really different expectations among these two user groups. I think that’s worth further research.
• March 21: Only one in four mobile apps engages user, study says. The results of this research didn’t surprise me — but it’s yet another reason why you should only build a native app when that’s the best way to offer a compelling experience. For the vast majority of content offerings, the mobile web is a better strategy.
• March 21: More apps may be coming for feature phones, too. Facebook bought Snaptu, a major platform for Java-based apps that run on most feature phones. I think this has wider implications — including that in the long run, as smartphone browsers improve, apps might become more of a feature phone phenomenon. Will keep an eye on this.
• March 18: What a Sprint-T-Mobile merger could mean for wireless users. Yeah, like a lot of tech reporters, I was on the wrong track here. While I was researching it, I remember thinking “Why the hell would a CDMA-based carrier buy a GSM network? That’d be a tech nightmare!” Wish I’d followed that thought further. A couple of weeks later, news broke that AT&T is trying to buy T-Mobile. Oh well.
• March 18: Google Maps’ Android app now routes drivers around traffic. As a car-free person, living in an urban area, I want this for biking directions. Maybe later…
• March 14: Adobe caves in to Apple: fewer blank spots on i-devices?. Yes, anytime I mention Apple, it gets a ton of attention and criticism. Couple that with a mention of a long-standing and confusing tech industry controversy, and it’s a flamefest. Despite the high troll potential, I’ll probably revisit this at some point. I will say that Adobe’s PR has been very constructive in how they’ve been reaching out to me on this.
• March 4: More U.S. consumers buying Android phones than iPhones, BlackBerrys. New data from Nielsen showed that slightly more U.S. consumers are buying Android phones than any other type of smartphone. Yeah, this post brought out lots of tech fanboys and trolls.
• Feb 28: Immigrants more inclined to use tablet computers, study shows. This was a small study, but an interesting one. Possible explanation suggested by a commenter: “The reason for the disparity is because a tablet can boot up a keyboard in any language you want — while on a laptop you’re stuck with a QWERTY keyboard.”
• Feb 25: Android users wait and wait for OS updates. At the time, owners of the Samsung Captivate (AT&T’s flavor of the Galaxy S series) were still waiting to get updated to Android 2.2 (Froyo). They’ve since gotten that update — but I learned that Samsung has a pretty bad repuation regarding firmware updates. Bear that in mind if you’re shopping for a smartphone
• Feb 18: One-third of U.S. households lack broadband Web access. About the newNational Broadband Map, and a major year-end roundup report on the wireless industry, both from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Here’s a quick rundown of my own changes, and contributing reasons for them. I’d be curious to hear about other people’s personal media evolutions, too. Please share your own experiences in the comments below…

1. More conversation and annotation, less exposition.

I’m an avid user of two social media channels: Twitter and Delicious. Through these, I’ve gotten used to quickly stating what really needs to be shared or communicated. Most of the points I want or need to make don’t require exposition. Generally just a brief statement, or a link with context, will suffice. This is why the vast majority of my posts to this blog have been syndicated from links I’m saving and annotating in Delicious.

Personally, I think this is a gain, not a loss. For most things, I prefer more efficient communication. It allows me to cover more ground — and to learn more.

What’s lost? Not eloquence, since I was never very eloquent. However, continuity and context can suffer. Often it can be difficult for others (or for me) to follow my trail of breadcrumbs, to connect all the dots in order to see a larger picture. Yes, I still want a “me collector“.

2. More text, less voice.

I’ve never been much for talking on the telephone. I even squirm at face-to-face conversations that go on for more than about 20-30 minutes at a stretch.

Instant messaging suits me much better. It’s a key way that I keep in touch with the people who matter most in my life. Every day I text-chat with my current and former intimate partners, close friends, colleagues, and more casual friends. I’ve been able to connect with these people more substantially and meaningfully through instant messaging than by relying primarily on phone or voice.

I like the pace of IM conversations. They’re either very fast and functional (“Got a quick question for ya…”) or they ebb and flow over an hour or more. Depending on the conversation or person involved, I don’t like to feel the constant pressure to respond immediately that exists in phone or face-to-face conversations. In IM chats, pauses generally aren’t awkward, so conversation feels less forced. Even better, my attention is free to wander, as it is prone to do, without me seeming rude or uncaring.

What’s lost? I still see local friends face-to-face quite often, so I don’t feel I’m lacking conversation there. But I do make less effort than I probably should to reach out by phone to people who are important to me but who don’t use IM. So there is some relationship impact there. I do tend to prioritize people who are available via my preferred communication channels.

3. News: Listening up, reading down

It’s been many years since I read much news in print. But in the last couple of years I’ve found myself relying almost entirely on audio news podcasts for my daily fix of what’s happening. I prefer to listen to news while doing things: making breakfast, cleaning up, working out, running errands, strolling the neighborhood, etc. I don’t just sit there and listen to news, and I almost never watch video news podcasts. When I have to sit there for news, whether for reading or watching, I get antsy.

It’s not that I don’t read online news at all. Every day, I read a lot of online news — but rarely any more than headlines and the first few paragraphs of most online news stories. I’m one of those people who’s more likely to glance at the headlines and summaries on Google News (especially on my phone) a few times a day, and to maybe click through to a couple of stories.

There are exceptions: When an article is highly recommended by a friend or colleague, or when it’s extremely relevant to my specific circumstances or interests, I’m likely to read it through to the end. Quite often, for online news I really want to read, I’ll use Instapaper to transfer the content of that web page to my Kindle. I’m not crazy about reading long-format content in my web browser. I prefer an e-book reader. Both the Kindle device and the Kindle iPhone app offer me a great e-reader experience.

What’s especially interesting to me is that through audio news podcasts I feel a very strong loyalty to several mainstream and niche news brands (NPR, Slashdot Review, etc.). However, when reading online news via a web browser, I feel almost no brand loyalty. I have a strong preference for news aggregators over news sites. It’s very rare that I visit the home page of a news site.

What’s lost? For me, nothing. Do habits like mine hurt the news biz? I don’t think so — especially since it’s the only way I feel any loyalty for specific news brands these days.

4. Journaling: Sharp increase

2009 was an emotionally wrenching year for me. I sold my house, ended my marriage, transitioned to a very positive post-marriage relationship with my former spouse, moved from Boulder to Oakland, left my cats behind for now, downsized my possessions to fit into a single room, got knee surgery, dealt with knee surgery rehab, traveled a lot, had a very short and unhappy relationship with an unsuitable partner, began a much more rewarding and happy relationship with a very suitable partner, watched my cousin die from afar, and some other stuff…

Most of this I would never blog about. Some of it I wouldn’t tweet about, either. But I do write about it all, in my paper journal.

Yes, when it comes to working through difficult emotional stuff, journaling tends to work best for me. And this year I filled up three of them. That’s a lot for me. There have been times in my life when I didn’t journal much at all. For the past couple of years I’ve been journaling a lot, and it keeps me sane.

I like doing some writing that is only for me. And I like doing it by hand. I like the feel of a fine-point felt-tip pen on the creamy paper of a Moleskine journal. It feels deeply personal and intimate. I think better about how I feel when I journal. I understand myself and my life better. I forgive myself more, I allow myself more. I don’t worry about covering all bases or responding to critics. And right now, I need all of that.

5. Twitter as antidepressant

I’ve noticed that when I’m feeling low energy or in a down mood, spending a few minutes scanning Twitter tends to engage and energize me. I follow a lot of very interesting people and organizations on Twitter. Any time I dip my toes into that Twitter stream I always find something interesting, amusing, heartfelt, friendly, or useful.

…Yes, there’s some drivel and occasional nastiness. But I tend to unfollow people who get boring or mean there. So I’ve got a pretty high-quality Twitter stream.

I like that Twitter takes so little effort to read. (Similarly, I dislike Facebook because its interface is so chaotic.) I feel no pressure or desire to “catch up,” for me Twitter is all about right now. If I’m feeling lonely or bored or isolated, it’s an easy way to reach out to people I know. I respond often to other’s tweets, both publicly and by private direct message.

In a year of so much personal upheaval, having an instantly available ambient sense of my friends around me, and what they’re into, has helped keep me functional, balanced, and happier than I would have been otherwise.

The downside? Yes, sometimes Twitter can be too distracting. When I was having some especially hard times in my life earlier this year, I definitely used Twitter to procrastinate and distract myself. But that seems, for me, to be more a function of how I’m doing, rather than anything inherent to Twitter.

…Anyway, those are the changes I’ve notices in my own reading/writing patterns. What about you? Please comment below.

I’m an avid Kindle user, mostly because I’ve come to hate paper and need to save space. I love the device, I think it’s a great reading experience and it suits my lifestyle — even though Amazon’s choice to rescind my George Orwell anthology a few weeks ago was simply beyond parody. (Lesson: Back up all your Kindle content as soon as it arrives on your machine. I put Orwell back on my Kindle simply by copying it from my backup.)

In the last couple of weeks some significant problems have developed concerning non-Amazon content for my Kindle — specifically PDFs I’ve been trying to reformat for Kindle reading, and digests sent to my Kindle from my Instapaper account. In late July both of those services stopped working for me entirely. That’s a big problem for me. Without those services, the Kindle is much less useful to me.

I don’t know whether other Kindle users are having these problems, but I thought I’d explain what I’m experiencing just in case someone has an explanation or solution. I’m working with Kindle support on this, but they said it might take a couple of weeks to resolve.

Here are the details…

I’m a fan of the free service Instapaper, which I use to import to my Kindle content that I’d rather not read on my computer (basically, anything long-format). My Instapaper account is configured to send a daily digest of saved items to my Kindle, as long as I’ve saved a minimum of three items. That worked fine… Until July 25. Since then I’ve received no Instapaper digests on my Kindle, although I’ve continued to save Instapaper items since them.

Also, I often use the service available from Amazon under “Manage my Kindle” to format PDF files for Kindle reading. I’ve found this is perfect for reports and other documents I’d rather read on a Kindle than via laptop or printout. The way this service works is that Amazon designates an e-mail address for your Kindle. When I send e-mail to that address, and attach a PDF file, within a minute or so Amazon sends me a Kindle-formatted version of the file. (You can do that for free if you download it to your computer and transfer via cable to your Kindle, or they’ll ding you $0.15/MB to download wirelessly to your device.)

Since July 21 I’ve tried to format several PDFs this way. I e-mail them to Amazon, and nothing comes back. No file, no bounce message or error message. It just vanishes.

I just talked to a gentleman in Kindle support. He didn’t have an answer, but is looking into it. He has no idea what might be interfering with my attempts to reformat PDFs. However, he did say it’s possible that Amazon may have elected to block my incoming digests from Instapaper even though I’ve authorized Instapaper to send files to my Kindle for months!

He’s checking on whether Instapaper was blocked from my account, but it could take a couple of weeks to get an answer from the Kindle tech team on that.

While it’s possible these two problems are unrelated, it’s conspicuous that they developed simultaneously. The effect is that right now the only content I can get onto my Kindle is content acquired through Amazon’s Kindle store: purchased or free books, sample chapters, my Technology Review subscription, the Amazon Daily newsletter, etc. It’s weird.

Has anyone else had this Kindle problem lately? What was the cause, and how did you resolve it? Please comment below. I’ll be posting updates to this issue.

A month ago, as I wrote earlier, I was willing to pay $10/month to subscribe to the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle. I canceled that subscription last week, after the release of the WSJ iPhone application that provides free access to all WSJ content.

The iPhone app carries ads at the bottom of the screen, but I don’t mind. I also get audio and video content from WSJ through the app, too. Meanwhile, Subscribing to WSJ.com currently costs $89 per year. ($99 per year if you want the print edition, too.) And, as I noted earlier, WSJ’s own subscription page currently doesn’t even mention subscribing via Kindle.

Apparently WSJ plans to start charging for some of its iPhone app-delivered content at some point. Wired.com reports:

“There is free, and then there is free, apparently. A Dow Jones spokeswoman wrote to Wired.com Thursday to say that the company does intend to charge for some content consumed on smartphones ‘so we have a consistent experience across multiple platforms,’ though the company is ‘still exploring its options’ and isn’t saying when that might happen. They would offer ‘both free and subscription content, so the idea is to mirror the experience on the site,’ the spokeswoman said.”

“…Eight months after it released its Blackberry app Dow is still saying that ‘Full access to subscriber content (is free) for a limited time only.’ There is a free mobile site that has a large sampling of the Journal’s content. …We’ll see if the almost certain bad will of a giveth and taketh away revenue model is worth trying to put the content genie back in the bottle.”

WSJ.com founding editor and publisher Neil Budde (who just joined Daily Me) recently exploded some common myths about WSJ.com’s pricing model — a nuanced history that often gets oversimplified.

Still, I think Printcasting founder Dan Pacheco got it right last night on Twitter: “Content pricing must be consistent across platforms. And it shows how charging for print will get more awkward day by day.”

…After I originally published the above story in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits yesterday, Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review took what I said as an excuse to rally for WSJ to “hold the line” on charging for its content.

I found this very amusing…

As I commented on the CJR piece, it seems to me that the WSJ iPhone and Blackberry applications indicate that the WSJ may be exploring the value of free content, without admitting that’s what they’re doing. Personally, I doubt their paid content model will last. I suspect it will get whittled away over time, to be replaced by various services. (Like, even, selling wine. No kidding.)

It’s worth repeating an anecdote I recounted last month in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Bill Grueskin (former managing editor of WSJ.com and now dean of academic affairs for Columbia University’s journalism school) related in Reflections of a Newsosaur on Mar. 22:

One day last month, a Columbia journalism student asked me in class why WSJ.com had started as a paid site. This moment reminded me of the scene in Annie Hall (about two minutes into this), where Woody Allen produces Marshall McLuhan to refute (OK, I get the irony) a pompous Columbia instructor pontificating about the media.

At the class, I turned to my co-instructor, Peter Kann, former CEO of Dow Jones and the person ultimately responsible for the paid strategy.

“I made the site paid because I was ignorant,” Kann told the class. “I didn’t know any better. I just thought people should pay for content.”

‘Nuff said. Well, and then there’s that video I posted above. Yeah. Plus all the Columbia j-school connections bouncing around here. Coincidence? I think not

…Anyway, Zach Seward of Nieman Labs noted in a comment at Tidbits: “This interview I did with Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, might help clarify things a little bit. It’s about the concept behind the WSJ iPhone app. At the end of the video, he says:

“Inititally, it will be free, as is the BlackBerry app, but the ultimate plan is to pattern those mobile devices off of the website, which is to say, we’ll give you all the political coverage, the opinion coverage, the arts and leisure coverage, and a certain number of the big stories of the day for free. We’ll give you a snippet, a preview of any story for free. But if you want access to the full depth and breadth of our coverage, you’re gonna have to pay for it on the the iPhone on the BlackBerry, just as you would on the website.”

The new Wall Street Journal iPhone app from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo

My response: OK, let’s see you do that. If the WSJ is so dedicated to its high-profile paid content model, then why make the content completely free on the mobile apps at all? I strongly suspect what’s going on here is that WSJ is using mobile apps to quietly explore free-content business models, without admitting that’s what they’re doing. Time will tell.

plasticlogic

What might a larger-screen e-reader look like? Here's what Plastic Logic plans to release later this year. Whether Amazon will follow suit remains to be seen.

Over the weekend, while I was reading the Wall Street Journal on my Kindle e-reader (I pay $10/month for that subscription), I noticed this headline: Amazon Is Developing Bigger-Screen Kindle. I found the article interesting for several reasons — including that the sole source for the headline’s claim is the unnamed group, “people who said they have seen a version of the device.” I was even more surprised to read that “the new Kindle could debut before the 2009 holiday shopping season, they said.” That’s pretty damn ambitious.

…WSJ.com also noted that an Amazon spokesman “declined to comment on what he called ‘rumors or speculation.’”

Hmmm… could this be a replay of the rumors of an Apple tablet computer that have been recurring for years? (Thanks for the reminder of that, Ron Miller.)

A larger-format Kindle would indeed be an attractive product to many consumers. It would be even more appealing to news organizations that are already selling (or are considering selling) Kindle subscriptions to their content. The Kindle’s current screen size significantly constrains formatting and excludes advertising — and thus news revenue potential for this device.

When considering this story’s conspicuously scanty sourcing, I noticed that this article did not acknowledge that the Wall Street Journal — and every other news org selling Kindle subscriptions — stands to benefit financially from the availability of a larger-size Kindle. In other words, the Journal used a definitively-worded headline to amplify an unconfirmed rumor that, if true, might eventually increase its e-reader revenue stream. And this claim has been widely repeated.

Of course, Amazon’s alleged forthcoming Kindle is not the only emerging larger e-reader option…

I reported earlier that Hearst says they’re working on their own e-reader. And Plastic Logic has been signing up content partners (including news content) for its larger-format e-reader, which Plastic Logic says it will start rolling out later this year. But Amazon is a very strong consumer brand, and the Kindle has consumer market traction — significant potential advantages to publishers seeking e-reader revenues sooner rather than later.

Also, the WSJ tech site All Things D reported April 2 that Rupert Murdoch mentioned that News Corp (which owns the Journal) is investing in an as-yet-unspecified large-format e-reader. Peter Kafka wrote:

“I checked in with a News Corp. spokesperson, who confirmed that I hadn’t been hallucinating: News Corp. is indeed in ‘exploratory’ talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies.”

So: Could this Kindle story be an attempt by the Journal to nudge Amazon in a favorable business direction? The possibility is strong enough that I’m personally very skeptical about the WSJ article’s key claim. Either a more nuanced headline or stronger sourcing would have made this story less of an ethical gray area.

AM I A WSJ SUBSCRIBER, OR NOT?

…This Kindle-WSJ connection is the kind of thing I love to point out on Twitter. But to tweet it, I needed a link to the story. (You can’t tweet web links directly from the Kindle.) So I had to look up the story on WSJ.com. There, the full text of this particular story is available only to Journal subscribers — which makes me hesitant to link to it, since most people would not be able to read it.

But I found the context surrounding this article intriguing enough (and considered that I probably have at least some fellow paying Journal subscribers in my Twitter posse)… so I thought it might be worth making an exception and providing a link to subscriber-wall content.

I tried to log in to the site as a subscriber, to check that the full article was indeed available there. Guess what? WSJ.com doesn’t think I’m a subscriber — even though I pay for this publication on my Kindle. That’s right: currently there is no way for paying Kindle subscribers to log in to WSJ.com in order to gain access to their full Web content. In fact, the Journal’s own subscription page currently doesn’t even mention the Kindle as an option.

Hmph. Maybe the circulation, business development, and editorial departments at the Journal should sit down together and talk about this one.

Oh, and to add another layer to this onion… Recently I noted in Tidbits that WSJ.com’s managing editor Bill Grueskin and former Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann made some amusing comments about how the site’s initial paid-content strategy was “ignorant.” Seems that under News Corp. management, this misguided thinking continues…

I’ve made a discovery about Amazon’s Kindle e-reader: It’s a pretty good “news radio.” That is, its text-to-speech function does a surprisingly decent job of reading news content aloud.

I currently subscribe to the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle, and I’ve gotten in the habit of letting it read me some interesting articles as I go through my morning routine. I like it. The automated text-to-speech reader is a bit flat for fiction, narrative, and essays that require significant emotional or rhetorical inflection — but it’s great for news. I’ve starting considering it my “robotic NPR.”

(Ducking the reflexive outcry from all my friends at NPR…)

Of course, my point isn’t only about the Kindle. It’s about how any text-to-speech service or tool can interact with text-based news and information content — and why creators of text-based news content should start to take that into consideration. Because you never know exactly how people will experience your content…

Like e-reader display technology, text-to-speech technology has improved significantly in the last few years. It’s still far from perfect, but of all the versions I’ve heard the Kindle’s is one of the clearest, and others are catching up. This is good for people who have a preference for audio news, because now we can experience news produced for text in a format that works with our preferences.

Don’t get me wrong — I love news specifically produced for audio (either radio broadcast or audio/video news podcast). I listen to a lot of it. (Oh, if you haven’t tried the Public Radio Tuner iPhone application, get it, it’s killer.)

Still… It’s pretty cool to be able to have stories from WSJ.com read aloud to me while I cook my veggie pesto omelet. Or articles from the newly online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which I can quickly “Kindlfy” via the free Instapaper service, which I wrote about earlier.

As text-to-speech technology continues to improve and proliferate, I’d suggest that text news publishers consider how well their online and Kindle content “reads,” in the audible sense. One thing I don’t like about listening to WSJ stories via Kindle is that it reads aloud all the navigational context at the top of the story: word count, etc. This is just a minor and fast irritation, but it bugs me. There’s got to be a way to get around that.

So, as I recommended when I first wrote about the Kindle 2, when your newsroom gets its Kindle (or when you get to fondle someone else’s for a bit), try listening to some news stories (preferably your own, but anyone’s news is a good start). You can subscribe to many newspapers and magazines via the Kindle store for a free two-week trial, or buy an individual article or two. Play with the settings for speed, gender of voice, etc. Realize that you’re listening to a stepping stone technology that presages a potentially important channel for your news in the future. And just keep it in mind.

(Note: This is a slightly re-edited version of an article I originally published in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Now that I own (and use daily) a laptop, iPhone, and Kindle, I’m developing a new relationship to text content. I realize that I shouldn’t have to care about the device. The news and other content I choose to read should just be there — available on whichever of my devices I prefer at the moment, in a format friendly to that device.

This is especially true for anything longer than about 750 words. I’ve found that’s my personal limit for reading through a Web browser, either on my laptop or iPhone. Yes, I can and do occasionally slog through longer Web-based content on those devices. But honestly, after about 750 words I tend to stop truly reading and instead scan quickly through the rest to gauge whether it’s worth further reading.

So I was pleased to recently discover an online service called Instapaper, which makes it easier to read electronic long-format content and to share that content across multiple devices.

Here’s how it works…

How Instapaper works: After you set up a free account, install Instapaper’s “read later” bookmarklet in the Web browser toolbar on your computer.

Next, install the free Instapaper iPhone application on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Launch it and enter your account information. Then click “settings” and click the “install ‘read later’ in Safari” button there. Follow the instructions for installing that bookmarklet in mobile Safari.

Finally, connect your Instapaper account to your Kindle — which you can do under “account” when you’re logged in on the Instapaper site. Then, when you save items with Instapaper, the service will route them to Amazon for Kindle reformatting and wireless download to your Kindle.

…I know, it sounds like a lot of steps. Personally, I’d prefer it if this integration process was more streamlined. I suspect that, as mobile technology matures and devices become easier to integrate, this will happen. Still, you don’t have to be a tech wiz to get Instapaper to talk to all your devices. Integration setup is a little tedious, but not hard.

Once it’s all set up, here’s the result: When you find text content that is longer than you’d comfortably read through the Web browser on your computer or mobile phone, you can save it in a central online location that automatically distributes it to your other devices which offer more comfortable reading. So anytime, anywhere, you can have a comfortable reading experience of the content you choose with whatever device you have handy. You don’t need to remember to print anything, or to copy a file somewhere — it’s just there for you.

While the Kindle probably offers the most comfortable reading experience of all my devices, I especially notice the benefits of Instapaper on my iPhone. Mobile Safari is a pretty good mobile browser, but it’s a hassle for reading long text documents. Quite often I’ll follow a link on my phone to something I want to read. Once I realize that I want to read it — and that it’s more than about 750 words long — I immediately save it to Instapaper. Then I switch to the Instapaper iPhone app for a more comfortable, user-friendly mobile reading experience.

True, Instapaper works well with a combination of devices that I happen to own. But it’s an example of a general strategy I suspect will become increasingly popular — especially if e-readers like the Kindle drop in price. Content shouldn’t be pigeonholed by device.

This is a crucial step beyond offering printer- or mobile-friendly versions of your content — it gives users more control over how they experience your content. And as the rapid growth of online and mobile media shows, people like to be in control of their own media experience.

…If you’re skeptical whether more advanced mobile devices will catch on beyond the techno-elite, bear this in mind: Last week I was on a bus in Oakland, Calif. I overheard a guy sitting behind me, talking on a simple cell phone which would have seemed luxurious a decade earlier. He was saying, “OK, well I confirmed my appointment at the Social Security agency. I’m serious about getting off the streets…”

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Last week, Hearst Newspapers made two big announcements: That Hearst intends to begin charging for some of its online news, and that it plans to soon launch its own e-reader device to rival Amazon’s Kindle 2.

Gawker cynically decries Hearst’s plan as The Last Stand of a Doomed Industry, but I think this is a step in the right direction — although I would encourage Hearst to think carefully whether it really wants to be in the device business.

We’ve seen how well grasping too tightly to the “paper” part of “newspaper” has worked out from a business perspective. I don’t think getting into the “e-reader” business is a better plan. When news companies get bogged down with manufacturing and owning the delivery vehicles for their content, they lose flexibility and start making backwards-focused business decisions.

It might make more sense for Hearst or other news publishers to partner with the maker of a popular, user-friendly e-reader to create a special-edition product for news. Here’s why…

CNET reports that currently price is stalling the growth of the e-reader market. (I know — I just paid $359 for my Kindle 2.) Yet, this technology is finally getting to the point that these devices are increasingly appealing and user-friendly. Look at how the iPod revolutionized how people interact with music — and the music business. Look at how the iTunes store is faring compared to, say Tower Records.

That’s a compelling precedent: The right kind of tool can change the media game, quickly.

Subsidizing the cost of e-readers could help this market grow quickly in a way that supports more modern and adaptable business models for news. Silicon Alley Insider recently offered their reasoning — and math — about why Printing the NYT costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle. They note: “As a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”

In the current sour economy — plus the pitiable financial circumstances into which many (perhaps most) mainstream news organizations have cornered themselves thanks to backwards, insular thinking — there is no excuse for such laughable inefficiency.

After all, the core business of a news organization is to create content and deliver advertising. Technology and manufacturing has never been their strength. Delivery vehicles (from regular paper to the internet to e-readers and beyond) are fluid and will continue to evolve. This means that, in order to focus on their core business, it probably makes more sense for news organizations to create partnerships for delivery vehicles — so they can adapt quickly to changing technologies, needs, and opportunities.

WHAT HEARST IS DOING

Fortune reported (via CNN Money): “Given the evolving state of the technology, the Hearst reader is likely to debut in black and white and later transition to high-resolution color with the option for video as those displays, now in testing phases, get commercialized. Downloading content from participating newspapers and magazines will occur wirelessly. For durability, the device is likely to have a flexible core, perhaps even foldable, rather than the brittle glass substrates used in readers on the market today.

“What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models. ‘That’s something you will never see Amazon do,’ someone familiar with the Hearst project said. ‘They aren’t going to give up control of the devices.’”

CNET noted: “It’s unclear if the device Hearst has been working on has anything to do with the eReader that Plastic Logic unveiled recently, but its principle seems the same. It’s a handheld device used to read digital content, much like the Kindle. The main difference would be that Hearst’s e-reader has a much larger size to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines.”

I think Hearst’s plan is bold, but I’m skeptical of it for the same reason cited by Priya Ganapati in Wired.com “Hearst doesn’t have the tech credibility or relationships to make this a successful venture.”

Ganapati also wrote: “Hearst Interactive director Kenneth Bronfin sits on the board of directors for E Ink, the company whose screens power both the Kindle and Sony Reader. That means an E Ink screen is a near certainty for the Hearst e-reader. However, if Hearst plans to launch an e-reader this year it is likely the screen will be black and white, rather than color.

Ganapati’s story quoted Forrester analyst James McQuivey, who thinks a device that debuts with a black and white screen would be a deal killer for many of the company’s subscribers. “Periodicals are just not effective in black and white. People who buy Esquire or Harper’s Bazaar buy them because they want to see the magazine in color,” he told Wired.com.

WHERE PRINT MIGHT STILL MAKE SENSE

OK, I’m ready for the print-fetishist chorus: “But we love our newspapers! We adore the rustle and feel of the paper, the ink on our fingers, the pretty glossy big magazine photographs… No! No! We’ll never give up print!”

Fine. You can have your print — via smarter technology and business models, like small and nimble print on demand operations, or Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting project. Really. Print retains significant appeal and utility in some market segments, so it can and should continue there.

But as the core daily mass-market product for a news organization, print is a financial black hole.

Tradition is lovely, but unless you’re in the antique, museum, or theme park business, nostalgia makes for a poor business model.

NOTE: This is an expanded and much more opinionated version of an article I posted yesterday on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

Kindle HHG

The truth about the Kindle 2

By the way… XKCD is a brilliant and poignant webcomic, one of my favorites. It’s also CC-licensed. Go check it out.

kindle-breakfast

News on a Kindle 2: Part of my balanced daily breakfast.

Last week my Kindle 2 e-reader from Amazon arrived. I swore to my brother a couple of years ago I’d never buy 1.0 of anything ever again — and I’m glad I waited. I played briefly with a friend’s first-edition Kindle last year and was intrigued. The new version has a better display, better form factor, and better usability.

This device is far from perfect, but it’s impressive. It’s pricey ($359) — but I still think even the most cash-strapped newsroom should acquire one and make it available so journalists, editors, designers, and news technologists can play with it. If you can’t or won’t buy one and you’re in the online news biz, go buy a Kindle 2 owner a beer and play with theirs for an hour or two at least.

Why? Because I seriously suspect devices like this could become game-changers for online and mobile news — perhaps surprisingly fast. That is, if online news operations start taking e-reader technology seriously and work with Amazon and other e-reader makers to improve e-reader news delivery. We still have a way to go, but I see significant’s potential.

Currently Kindle is mainly intended for reading books. But Amazon has always sold newspapers and magazines (one-offs and subscriptions) since it launched the Kindle Store. Yes, that’s right: sold. As in: revenue.

This week I bought a couple of issues of Technology Review, and I even subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Yep, subscribed. Paid for it. Me. $5.99 per month. Imagine that.) Generally, I like getting news via Kindle, but there are some glitches.

My observations so far…

1. Kindle Store needs more news providers

Currently just under 100 newspapers and under 50 magazines and journals are available in Kindle format. As far as I can tell, that’s up even from last week. If your news isn’t sold in the Kindle Store yet, check into this option. If it isn’t too hard to do and the business deal is acceptable (see point 5 below), this might be free money. (I’d love to hear from people who have done this about what’s involved with creating and distributing a Kindle version of a publication.)

2. Better news navigation needed

Right now, when I go to the home page of a newspaper or magazine on my Kindle, I’m presented with the main story and a small “section list” navigation item at the bottom. When I click on that, I see a list of sections: just sections. Which isn’t very helpful — since I then must choose a section and click through the stories one by one.

It appears that there might be at least some flexibility with the current Kindle 2 to improve news navigation at least slightly. Over on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, Jim Romenesko commented to me: “Amy: It took me a few days to find them, but the Wall Street Journal on Kindle 2 has headlines and blurbs for each section. To get them, you click on the number that indicates how many articles are in each section. The heads then come up.”

This makes me wonder: Is it possible to present a Kindle 2 news venue home page that has a Google-News-style list of headlines and blurbs that I can quickly scan and possibly customize? Then once I choose a story of interest, I’d like to see the full Kindle layout — which is pretty nice, I think.

I don’t know how much the Kindle 2 news navigation limitations are a function of how the Kindle works, or of how news organizations have been packaging and delivering content for Kindle distribution so far. But it’s definitely a huge usability issue that could put people off from this news consumption experience.

3. Search needs work to increase revenue potential

Right now you can only search within one document at a time on the Kindle. Which means that I can’t search for a keyword across all the books, PDFs, newspapers, and magazines I have stored there — just within one document at a time.

So, for instance, if I see an interesting article in Technology Review on the power grid, I can’t quickly look up related articles from previous issues of that magazine. If I could, I would love to preview them. And maybe buy some. See that’s the thing: Search can promote purchasing as well as build brand. All kinds of publishers — including news publishers — should work with Amazon on this issue. Everyone could benefit.

4. The display rocks

No, it’s not color (yet). No, it’s not huge (yet). No, it’s not a touchscreen (yet). I don’t care. This electronic ink display is crisp, easily readable, and quite attractive. I quickly grew accustomed to clicking a button to turn a page, make a note, or navigate among documents. Once that became automatic, I was blown away by the quality of the rendering. It’s the same reason why I prefer watching video podcasts and YouTube videos on my iPhone: the display is just that good, much better than my laptop. And I have a nice laptop.

5. Check the revenue-splitting deal

Right now, many authors’ groups are angry with Amazon over what they see as a grossly unfair deal for content providers in the Kindle Store’s book contract. (Author Dan Sawyer pointed me to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Alliance’s critical annotation of the Kindle Store contract.)

I haven’t yet investigated whether news publishers are getting a fair deal from the Kindle Store — but given this precedent, it’s worth looking into. If it’s a bad deal now, that just means there’s room to negotiate. (If you have information on how the revenue split and rights are handled for news publishers, please comment below or e-mail me.)

6. Kindle iPhone application needs news

This week Amazon also launched a free Kindle iPhone application. This is not meant to duplicate the Kindle e-reader experience on the iPhone, but rather complement what the Kindle does. Specifically, if you’re reading a Kindle book but get stuck in line at the DMV and don’t have your Kindle with you, you can whip out your iPhone and read for a while.

I tried this, and it works well. However, so far this app only delivers to your iPhone the e-books you’ve purchased via the Kindle Store — not any newspapers or magazines you may have bought there, nor any pdf files you might have converted for Kindle reading. This is disappointing. Many news orgs still have lousy mobile sites, or no mobile-friendly version of their site at all, or (as Barb Iverson and I complained last summer) they don’t default to the mobile version when accessed by a mobile browser — you need to enter a special mobile URL.

A Kindle version accessible via this iPhone app might be a good halfway step for news orgs that want to be more mobile. It might even be attractive to iPhone owners who don’t own a Kindle.

Meanwhile, Rob Weir has published a review comparing the Kindle iPhone e-reader app to Stanza, another popular iPhone e-reader app. Bottom line: Stanza wins on all major counts except the average price of e-books.

…I’ll be writing more about the Kindle. In the meantime, what’s your experience? Please comment below.

NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.