Mobile generation

Construction professionals are cottoning on to the potential of mobile news services. In recent weeks I have been gratified by the number of people telling me they are receiving industry news via their mobile phones. When I told one building estimator at an awards dinner that I was the web editor he almost fell off his chair to show me the construction news feeds on his Blackberry. And yes, Building’s feed was top of the list.

Checking news feeds on your mobile can be seriously addictive. My dinner companion told me he finds himself checking feeds whenever he has a spare moment on site. And I confess that while waiting for the bride to arrive at a recent wedding (not mine I hasten to add) I couldn’t help myself – I had to find out what had been uploaded since lunchtime.

Thankfully receiving news by phone and pda is no longer the preserve of the technology obsessed, as the list of the world’s most popular feeds testifies. The BBC’s sites are a favourite, as are the financial tipster Motley Fool and the Guardian sites.

New technology is helping. If you’ve considered upgrading your phone you would have seen that super-fast 3G smart phones are now the norm. Handsets now have an RSS reader built in, so accessing news on the go is a cinch to set up – I know because my 10-year old niece showed me how to do it.

To find out how to access Building’s news feeds visit www.building.co.uk/rssfeeds. Here you can also sign up to feeds for your PC or phone on sustainability, legal matters, and weekly housing and finance news.

This growing appetite for online news is just one of many trends affecting websites that I’ll be reporting on here in future weeks.

• Last week’s top five most read stories reveal just how susceptible readers are to a wind turbine story. News of a turbine falling overboard en route to a Scottish wind farm was almost as popular as a recent report on a giant Olympic wind turbine, which was the 10th most read story last month. Stories relating to the 2012 Games are always big, and Jack Lemley’s recent departure from the ODA garnered the most hits on the Building website this year so far.