I often find myself referencing an article in discussion and want to be able to share it with those I’m in discussion with or use it to prove a point. And other times, there’s just an interesting story I want to show someone because I can’t remember the details. Recently, I read an article in Wired magazine about the amount of caffeine in soft drinks. They published the findings from a test that identified the milligrams of caffeine included in the popular beverages. In the article, it made reference to a URL that had the full list. But, when I went to show my friend, and explore the rest of the list, I no longer had the magazine, nor could I find the article searching through their site.
Maybe it’s just me, who carries magazines around with me wherever I go and drops them into trash bins wherever I finish, but I’d like to have a way to keep track of those really good articles or even share them with friends on the spot. I think the easiest way to track and organize this process would be through a combination of SMS and the web. If each article had a unique ID, I could then send that ID to the magazine publishers short code. The system would then keep track of the article for me in as online bookmarks. The system could ask me if I’d like “more info”, if there was more to the article. It could then send my phone a URL where I could pull up the additional info (like the total list of sodas in the caffeine test). I could then forward it to a friend via my phone, or later share my bookmark with them.
The publishers would obviously love this. It would give them a way to track who’s reading what and when, which would be great for getting the advertisers excited about the print world in the way they like online ad tracking. And given many magazines are owned by the same publisher, they could use one system for all their magazines which would make it more valuable to the reader as well because then all their bookmarks would be together. They could even have features that allow the reader to comment directly on the article from their phone, and further connect the authors with the readers.