The time we used to spend sitting on the train on our way to work in the morning, reading the trusty local rag, has changed. Now, we whip out the iPhone, Android or iPad and catch up on all the blogs and online articles we found but didn’t have time to read the day before. On the way home, we do the same for those bits we found at work.

According to Read It Later, the app that lets users tag content on their computer to be, well, read later, mobile devices are helping people avoid the constant barrage of information and relegate reading back to the most comfortable time slots and locations of the day.

“Printed media used to allow us to read in the places we found most comfortable,” the company writes on its blog. “Unfortunately, as news and media moves online, it moves us away from these places and into our desk chairs. Even worse, consuming content is no longer on our own schedule. The flood of content disrupts us all day as if we have a maniacal paperboy throwing new editions on our doorstep every 15 seconds.”

According to Read It Later, those users with iPhones and iPads are shifting their reading times back to the most comfortable times – during breakfast, the morning commute, the commute back home and the very end of the day. The first graph the company offers is when users encounter content, according to when they tag it in Read It Later.

The graph of computer users (that is, desktops – you remember those, right?) isn’t much different. It follows the same general arc. iPhone users, however, show the greatest difference.

There are obvious spikes at the times previously mentioned – breakfast, the commutes, and the end of the day. iPad users, on the other hand, are primarily a prime-time group.

Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t so far off when he quipped that the iPad isn’t mobile?

Read It Later suggests that “When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs. They no longer consume the majority of their content during the day, on their computer. Instead they shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption.”

Fine. So, if you have a mobile device, you likely read content on a different schedule than if you don’t. What does this really mean? How does it affect the 24 hour news cycle? Although the focus has increasingly been put on real-time information and getting there first, could user behavior shift media back to a focus on quality rather than speed and quantity? I know that when I tag something in my Read It Later queue, it isn’t because it’s breaking – it’s because it sounds like an intelligent, in-depth piece that I want to take time to digest and it’s exactly that type of time-shifting of media consumption that, on a larger scale, could help assure the quality of online content.

Related posts:

1. News.me, NYT’s Stealthy Social News Project, Starts Accepting Invite Requests News.me, the stealthy social news project being developed by The…
2. Has Google Reader Gone Real Time? While haven’t been able to confirm this yet, it looks…
3. Google News Adds Awesome “Browse Mode” To Archived Newspapers Google just cannot stop releasing great products this month. Today…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

View full post on Web Technology News, Social Media and Web Apps

Today at CodeMash Microsoft announced a few new resources for ASP.NET developers: ASP.NET MVC3, IIS Express 7.5, NuGet,Orchard 1.0, SQL Server Compact Edition 4, WebMatrix.

Screenshot of the Orchard Project CMS management console. Looks a bit like WordPress doesn’t it?

ASP.NET MVC3 – The latest version of the MVC for ASP.NET. It includes a new view-engine option called “Razor,” better tools for working with JavaScript and HTML5 and several other improvements.

IIS Express 7.5 – A developer focused version of IIS that does not require admin rights to run and debug code from Visual Studio.

NuGet – An open source package manager designed to make it easier for ASP.NET developers to find, install, and use open source libraries for projects.

Orchard 1.0 – The Orchard Project is Microsoft-sponsored project dedicated to creating open source applications and reusable components in .NET. Orchard 1.0, a .NET based CMS, is its first project.

SQL Server Compact Edition 4 – A simple version of SQL Server for developers. It doesn’t even require installation to work.

WebMatrix – A starter-kit for ASP.NET developers. It includes: IIS Express, ASP.NET and SQL Server Compact. It also includes many open source code templates and an integrated SEO tool.

Many new programmers today begin by learning languages like PHP, Ruby and Python. It seems that Microsoft is trying to make it easy for beginners to start using ASP.NET instead. WebMatrix helps guide developers through the very basics, starting with CSS and working its way up to ASP.NET and SQL.

The Orchard Project’s CMS is a successor to the ill-fated Oxite CMS.ZDNet’s tk wrote the following when Orchard was announced:

As one reader (thanks, @karlseguin) noted, Oxite was anything but a big hit with developers, including many of those in Microsoft’s own .Net community. There have been many complaints about Oxite, from the development process, to the scope of the project, to the quality of the code and the way Microsoft explained the concept/product. Perhaps that’s one reason why Microsoft is starting over with a new codename and claiming this is not a Microsoft project.

Related posts:

1. More Awesome iOS Games to Come As Epic Games Releases Unreal Development Kit The technology behind some of the most popular video games,…
2. Are The Fortune 100 Now Beginning To Embrace Social Media Tools? A study by Burson-Marsteller finds that 79 percent of the…
3. Microsoft and Salesforce.com Patent Dispute – a Sign of Battles to Come? The story about Microsoft and Salesforce.com’s patent dispute is far…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

View full post on Web Technology News, Social Media and Web Apps