Borrowed from our company blog

Newspapers 1.0

February 22nd, 2008

One of my favorite things in life is reading newspapers. I will go to the library or local book seller and sit for hours reading the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The State newspaper out of Columbia, SC and my local newspapers. I also like to magazines. I’m subscribed to Mens Health and Wired, but for other magazines like Newsweek or Time and especially GQ and Vanity Fair, I don’t want to spend the money on the subscription if I can go somewhere and read it for free.

There are a couple problems associated with my information addiction (or pastime as I usually refer to it). One of them being that with Vanity Fair, I may like the bio-pieces they do on a certain celebrity or important person, but I don’t really care so much about the piece on the $700 t-shirt I wouldn’t buy even if I could afford, or their opinion pieces.

On the other hand, one of the things I enjoy the most about my iPod and iTunes is Podcasts. I can get my music fix with the Indiefeed and All Songs Considered podcasts. I can get The News From Lake Wobegon (Prairie Home Companion) and This American Life. I have the Podictionary podcast that gets into the etymology of words. I get my geek fix with Radiolab (which is making me crazy waiting on the new season). The point being that I get all sorts of different content that has absolutely nothing in common in anyway but all as soon as it’s available and all in my pocket and truck wherever I go.

The feature I am most excited about with ADynammic is getting my news and print media the same way I get my podcasts. The same thing iTunes did for radio, we want to do for the print media. I may want the headlines from The Economist and the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page, the new workout from Mens Health, and the latest musings on “Greifers” from Wired– and to have them update automatically on my computer with the same layout and design quality I have sitting in the library looking at the page. It’d also be nice to have them saved on my hard drive so that when the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop goes out (like has happened eight times while writing this), I can still read the article. Of course, I can also save it and go back to it later as long as I have enough space on my hard-drive or the cloud. When I moved a couple months ago, I bet I threw out 100 pounds of old issues of Mens Health that I would occasionally go back to and read. Not to mention all the trash I added to the Spartanburg County Landfill which was already too full.

So I guess for a little while longer I’ll keep having to pilfer through the “Flair” section of The Greenville News while looking for something I want to read. I guess I can handle the strange Dolce and Gabbana ads for a little while longer– but just a little while longer.

Trey