My Today Screen: So Far, So Good
Posted by Fred on April 4, 2008
At first, I was a little hesitant about My Today Screen, the new Windows Mobile site started by Doug Goldring (late of Just Another Mobile Monday) and Tariq Bamadhaj (from a bunch of places, including Pocket PC Mag and his own blog, which now redirects to MTS). After all, do we need yet another WM site linking to the same stories about the release of Opera Mini 4.1 or Windows Mobile 6.1? My Google Reader list already includes Engadget Mobile and MobileCrunch, The Boy Genius Report and Smartphone Thoughts.
However, I’m coming around, for a couple of reasons. First, although there’s little original reportage in the tech blog world, I have seen a few links on My Today Screen that I missed elsewhere, such as news of Amazon’s TextBuyIt service (I often miss items appearing first in TechCrunch, now that it’s descended almost completely into self-aggrandizement and Mike Masnick-style pseudoeconomic arguments about the collapse of the content industry business model). More importantly, I like the balance Doug and Tariq and friends have struck. With the advent of the iPhone Era, too many mobile tech sites have gone over the deep end, fawning over the device as if it hung from the tool belt of the Carpenter of Nazareth himself, or descending into bitterness as if Cupertino’s cell phone was a personal affront, or praising Microsoft’s OS like tweens at a Hannah Montana concert, as if their hysterics counterbalance the Apple-groping at Engadget and Gizmodo. My Today Screen seems to avoid all of that, treating WM like what it is, a tool that makes mobile phones do stuff.
With all of that said, there is one thing I wish the site editors would address - their entries in my RSS reader include this annoying disclaimer:
Copyright © 2008 My Today Screen. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact admin at MyTodayScreen.com so we can take legal action immediately. (2)
I think splogs are as annoying as the next blogger, but this is both ineffective and unnecessary. Most scrapers are now able to skip such disclaimers, and most readers are entirely capable of telling a legit site from a scammer looking to steal a few pennies via Google ads. Unfortunately, the visual clutter of MTS’ site design makes me want to stay within the confines of Google Reader, so I’ll just learn to tune out the disclaimer:
April 4, 2008 at 10:38 am
Hi Fred
Thanks for the writeup on My Today Screen.
I just like to address some issues that you have brought up.
The first is with the disclaimer. It’s located right at the end of the entry so there is minimal distraction to the reader. Why then would we place it there if not many will see it right? Well the reason is that it links back to our main site. Why this is important is that in the event that an article gets picked up by a splogs, we would still rank about those splogs in search engine queries. Without this, the chances of a splog ranking higher than us for the same article is increased (sad but true and it has happened to a number of sites). So that is why we have the disclaimer.
As for the top heavy site, well, we plan to make it less so after the launch. And at closer look, you will notice that our Popular Articles section is constantly and so is our Recommended Software section so that readers are greeted with something different each time they log on. Again, as we are a new site, there might not be much to rotate from but this will change in the upcoming days and weeks I assure you.
Once again, thanks for your article on this and I look forward to your participation on the site.
April 4, 2008 at 10:50 am
Thanks for the nice writeup, Fred. I agree with you about the iPhone vs Windows Mobile debate. I frequently find myself saying, “we are still talking about cell phones here.” It is important to keep that kind of perspective. :) None of this really matters except to the people it matters to.
As for the copyright, we’ll take a look at it.
Doug
April 4, 2008 at 11:29 am
Hello Fred
Just an update, the RSS Feed has been toned down so expect to see something even shorter now :D