Delicious Today: Mobile Use Survey, NYT Custom Feeds

#1: Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index

• "77% of respondents used their mobile for a purpose other than voice and SMS.
• Most participants used voice (95%) and SMS (98%).
• 56% of respondents used their mobile phone to get information at least once a month.
• 51% of respondents used their mobile phone for entertainment purposes at least once a month.
• 21% of respondents said they visit websites on their mobile phone at least once a day, while 25% of respondents said they carry out mobile searches at least once a week.
• Overall, 34% of respondents accessed websites on their mobile phone by typing in a URL, 18% were likely to access the Web using the mobile phone company’s portal and 17% accessed the Web from a text message.
• Only 30% used their mobile phone exclusively for personal use. This result is consistent with previous surveys."
  

About advertising on mobile phone:

• "39% of respondents stated that they would accept ads on their mobile phone in exchange for free mobile content or special offers (not collected in Survey 3)
• 25% of respondents stated that they would accept ads on their mobile phone (up from 5% in Survey 3)
• 44% of respondents stated that they would accept ads that offer them incentives (down from 55% in Survey 3)
• 36% of respondents stated that they would accept ads from companies with whom they have an existing relationship (up from 8% in Survey 3)"

For public broadcasters, two findings in the survey are most relevant.

1. More than half of respondents use their mobile phones to get information and entertainment, which means that mobile phone has become another mass media channel alongside newspaper, radio, television, computer. Because mobile phone is a "security blanket" for many people -- can't go anywhere without it -- it's likely that mobile media channel will be the most personal, most programmed, and most customized among all channels. To effectively reach people on mobile, public broadcasters need content and delivery strategies to allow mobile audience to quickly identify content of their interest, and easily assemble a personal stream of content from different programs and stations. One good example is the New York Times' custom feeds prototype (see #2 in this post).
2. About a third of respondents are willing to accept ads on mobile. That should give public broadcasters a reason to explore use of ads on mobile as a revenue stream.
   

#2: New York Times Custom Feeds
This is a very easy yet extremely flexible tool. You type any search terms, NYT then assembles all news stories in its archive about those terms into a single news feed for you to subscribe to. I'm a big RSS feed user. But most RSS feeds are dictated by news organizations with categories like "international," "editorial" -- too broad for my purpose. I just want all stories about, say, the future of journalism. I can use Google Alerts to get stories about that, but the results are from general Google search thus include too much junk; and results are delivered only by email, not RSS feed that's much easier to manage. NYT's custom feeds solve both problems.

Public broadcasters need to have our own custom feeds. NPR allows audience to build their own custom podcast. Why not custom feeds, not just for NPR content but for all public radio and television stations' content?