Doing the .mobi Thing

I’ve been surfing the mobile web for the past month or so, and I’m not impressed. Maybe I haven’t tried hard enough to find good sites. Maybe there aren’t any out there. I guess I complained enough to our resident production guru, Mike McCabe, that he decided to put his own site, www.thebestindiemusic.com on the mobile web. When he told me to bring it up on my Motorola Q, I was impressed (see www.thebestindiemusic.mobi). Note the .mobi extension. According to a company called dotMobi, the .mobi domain addresses the need for seamless access to Internet-enabled mobile phones.

Mike’s site comes up like many other mobile web sites, with a text-based menu. But the ease of use and speed of operation is significantly better than the WAP-based mobile sites I had tried years ago. Mike’s site offers some sample music, and I was able to quickly download a song and play it on my phone.

Mike then sent me a link to a pdf document that tells you how to develop .mobi web sites: http://www.thebestindiemusic.com/Level2/dotMobiWeb%20DevelopersGuide.pdf. Now I’m wondering why more of my favorite .com web sites aren’t buiding .mobi sites.

I checked out the following .mobi site, which contains a sampling of the best of them: http://demo.mtld.mobi. There were 32 sites listed. Mike’s site wasn’t on the list, by the way.

An alternative to .mobi sites is a relatively new service from Yahoo! called Yahoo! Go (still in the gamma version of the software for my phone). It looks like an interesting way to browse the web with a mobile device. You can get to it via http://mobile.yahoo.com.

I left off with Mike that he should develop a .mobi site for www.eepn.com, which for starters would include the products that we post on the web each day. Just something to read on a mobile phone when you’ve got some spare time. E-mail comments to me at [email protected]