AvantGo for RSS
A posting that's been getting a lot of link-love recently is The State of Online Feed Readers, which reviews the major online feed readers — web applications that let you track changes to your favorite blogs and sites via their RSS/Atom/flavor-of-the-moment feeds. Personally, I use Bloglines to track the blogs I read (including this one — always subscribe to your own blog using one of these guys to make sure your feed is working!).
Blatant plug for my employer: Not everyone uses feed readers — this is why I provide an option to read this blog via email (see the note at the end of this posting) — but if you do and if you have a mobile device, look into the AvantGo for RSS service. This lets you subscribe to any RSS/Atom feed and have it sync to your device with the rest of your AvantGo channels. (If you don't know what AvantGo is, please read What is AvantGo? for a good overview.)
Which also brings up an important topic: optimizing your blog for handheld devices. If your blog is mostly text, you probably don't have anything to worry about, not if you can get mobile readers to read it via your RSS feed. (See above!) But as anyone who's ever browsed websites directly on a mobile device can attest, the user experience can be poor if you're not seeing pages optimized specifically for mobile devices (like AvantGo channels). I think I'll save that for another post, though, as it's a complicated topic to discuss.
AdSense publishers, take note that in many cases AdSense ads won't display in handheld browsers, because they're JavaScript-based. Logistically, the ads would probably take up too much screen space anyhow, so this is probably not a bad thing. That's why simpler linked-based solutions (affiliate programs and the such) make more sense on that kind of platform.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
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