G24: The Guardian’s downloadable version

I was a bit slow to notice but those clever monkeys over at The Guardian have done it again:

“The Guardian is launching a new service providing readers with a rapid overview of news that will be updated every 15 minutes.

“G24 will be a free service featuring news content from the Guardian Unlimited website across five areas: general news, international, economics, sport and media.”

As Nick Baum says, this service will suit any news-obsessed person who spends time away from the internet - train commuters, for example. See for yourself here.

The downloads are PDFs of between eight and 12 pages, updated every fifteen minutes throughout the day. Their creation is automated, I assume, with newly published copy flowing in. They’re visually and pictorially very minimal.

Financially, MIT’s Advertising blog commented:

“And then they will insert ads, dynamically generated to fit readers profiles and perhaps past behavior, the ads that people will print out and read on their ride home. Very smart.”

According to The Blog Herald, a dutch blog - Startlog.nl - began producing 30,000 copies of a free, weekly, colour tabloid version of its website content from January this year. The hope was that advertising revenue could be used to pay its contributing bloggers.

Here’s a reader’s comment on that concept:

“Haha, that is the dumbest idea ever - lets take a searchable, cross referenced, interactive conversation that people can take part in - and make it static, linear and oh, while we’re at it lets kill a bunch more trees.”

Even so, how long before these two concepts come together?

6 Comments so far

It is an interesting bit of tech, but I wonder how long it will be around as we can already follow RSS feeds on a mobile device?

If someone is brave enough to work on a free WiFi offering then you could follow the latest sports stories from anywhere in the city - but that’s another story.

WiFi isn’t the only hold-up: I can’t even afford a decent laptop.

Plus, what would you do in the countryside? Connecting to the net on a mobile is pricey!

Make it free in the city and then offer a resonably priced monthly service once in the countryside/suburbs.

The MEN should have done this with its supposed free WiFi in the city centre, here’s my thre’pence ha’penny:
http://www.cmnw.co.uk/2006/07/when_free_wifi_.html

Even just the Oxford Road corridor would be a decent start. But I’m sure there are plenty of parties who would rather that didn’t happen - Starbucks, for one.

If free WiFi was commonplace I’d definitely buy a nice mobile device…

It would attract businesses to set up in Manchester, which would increase revenues for the council and so allow them to improve facilities in the city.

More people would then move to the city, creating a pool of talent that creates more businesses etc…

Starbucks would have plenty of thirsty workers to sell their coffee to ;-)

Connecting to the net in the countryside would be expensive, yes. Laptops are coming down in price significantly though - there was a recent offer of a free laptop when you order a broadband connection. This year’s only going to see that become even more commonplace.

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