More on SMS and Sri Lankan news

I got a couple of nice comments on the post about JNW's SMS service for Sri Lankan news.

Sanjana Hattotuwa launched a citizen journalism intitative in SriLanka thats doing well at http://www.groundviews.org/. I'll explore this effort fully in a post of its own soon.

Sanjana also keeps a blog at ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace), where he offered this more detailed overview of JNW. Its a great, accurate read, Im inclined to agree with his assessment re some lack of clarity surrounding JNW's web presentation. He also tipped me to Rasasa, an app that will send your favorite RSS feeds to your IM messenger, email, or cell.

As Sanjana put it, "JNW's great, but is still just scratching the surface of what's really possible using SMS and the web." Sanjana has written several articles on JNW's effort throughout his blog ( links to other posts are at the end of his article I linked to).

The editor of JNW himself, Chamath Ariyadasa, chimed in on my earlier post:

Yes, its an interesting exploration, and after 23 months of dire financial issues, I am happy to say that we are now lifting our heads out of the water.

With agreements with five telecom operators and a possible sixth, we may pass 100,000 subscriber mark fairly quickly.

I am keen to get outside perspective on what we are doing, and would appreciate your opinion on the following:

I think a key benefit of SMS is empowerment, and I don't see any downside to SMS except varying degrees of choice that can be offered to the public.

What I mean is that, if I wasn't a journalist and I had a reuters terminal at home I would feel fairly confident that I was in on the news, and that the news came to me rather than the other way around. Ofcourse I would be paying $1,000 per month for the dish version.

We are offering a similar service for Rs30 per month ($0.30). I am sure our subscriber base is now islandwide, which means almost anyone with a phone can now afford it.

Incidentally, Sri Lanka reached 8 million mobile subscribers out of a population of 19 million recently.

A big constraint though is user friendly vernacular fonts for mobiles, but I hope that changes soon.

If I'm reading the remarks correctly, I think the issue of varying degrees of choice can easily be met, and has Sanjana has pointed out throughout his various pieces, JNW could offer specific feeds based on interest:

JNW, in trying to be all things to everyone (which may have worked as a new startup) will soon begin to frustrate its subscribers with an overload of information that is mass produced and sent to everyone, with no real emphasis on the sectors they each work in.

While the quote was in relation to a podcast app from JNW, the principal is the same.

While location isn't always a factor in news relevance as Ive posted before, it can be, especially in a breaking news /alerts environment -- so feeds by region may be a feature to add. Question is if there are enough journalists for adequate geographical coverage, which is where teaming up with an initiative like Groundviews could be fruitful.

Question for techno developers ( I am not one):Can GPS data be encoded in SMS? As cell phones become more and more capable, I can envision a service where if Im driving through the countryside or across regions i can be alerted to news or info relevant to whatever location Im in at the moment. I know this is possible via other web data, - i.e., you can set up a similar service on your Blackberry or on web access from your phone -- but for phones or areas without mobile web - i.e., just SMS technology - can this be done?

JNW faces some competition from Ada Derana and Reuters arrangements with other mobile service operators as evidenced by reading through this thread , which to me opens up a whole new world of 2.0 journalism: what factors define quality in this mode? What makes good SMS journalism? what do people want to do with news received on their mobile?

Its a whole new question worth thinking about.