Add Don Dodge to the list of people who have swooned over the concept of a specific reader for a newspaper to the point where they just don't get it - he says this in response to Scoble, who had the same questions I did:

Newspapers and magazines have very powerful brands. Part of that brand is the look and feel or presentation of the information. The layout, the font, the headlines, and the advertising are all part of the reading experience. The newspapers and magazines want to replicate the news reading experience on line. Sorry Robert, but you can't do that with an RSS reader.

These News Readers will download the whole newspaper or magazine to your laptop or PDA within a couple minutes. Then you can read it at your leisure on the plane, bus, taxi, or where ever you are. No need for an Internet connection, and no need to scroll through hundreds of individual RSS feeds.

That's true. The trouble is, it doesn't matter, either. With an RSS reader or a web browser, I can read any news content I want, anywhere. With this reader, I can read the content for exactly one newspaper, period. What if I think to myself "well, that's what the Times thinks; I wonder what the WaPo has on it?" In Don Dodge's world, I download a second reader (and another for every paper I ever want to read). In mine, I use a single piece of software.

If the people behind this want a snowball's chance in heck of getting anywhere, then they'll need to define a common format that works across newspapers, and support it. They'll also have to figure out how to support that software, and convince people to use it instead of the tools they already have. Gee, there are even two formats out there that do this already; go figure.

Pretty doesn't matter here, as Matthew Ingram noted.

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