Here at Xconomy we may not be on the absolute bleeding edge of media technology—usually we’re too busy writing about the latest stuff to adopt it right away ourselves—but when there’s a cool new way to get our content out, we try to take advantage of it as soon as we can. In that spirit, we wanted to call your attention to a few of the features we’ve introduced lately to make Xconomy easier to use.
1. Social Media Sharing—including Twitter and Facebook
If you’re reading this story on our website and you glance at the upper right corner of the story area, just above the “Related Posts” section, you’ll see a new collection of widgets from ShareThis that make it easy to share Xconomy stories with your Twitter followers, your Facebook friends, and users of many other social bookmarking and sharing services. It’s also a snap to e-mail stories to your friends (or yourself). Just mouse over one of the widget icons and the ShareThis window will pop up.
We’re especially excited about the new Twitter button, which makes it really simple to tweet any story you like and was one of the most-requested features from our readers. Speaking of Twitter, you can sign up to follow us there at twitter.com/xconomy, twitter.com/bbuderi, twitter.com/ldtimmerman, twitter.com/ryan_mcbride, and twitter.com/wroush.
2. Single-Page View
Many Web users feel overwhelmed by long rivers of text, so we insert page breaks into our stories every 500 words or so. But we also realize that other readers dislike having to click the “next” link several times to get through our longer stories. So we’ve added a “Single Page View” option. You’ll find it at the bottom of each page of multi-page stories, near the “Page” link and the little orange arrow. Click on that link once, and you’ll be able to view even our longest columns and interviews with no further hassle. This is also a useful feature if you want to print out our longer stories.
3. Xconomy Kindle Edition
These days, there are as many ways to read digital content as there are digital devices. For readers who’ve joined the e-book revolution, we now offer a Kindle Edition of Xconomy, available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. To sign up, go to the Xconomy page on Amazon and click on the Subscribe Now button. Or, on your Kindle, click Menu > Shop Kindle Store > Blogs, then type in Xconomy and click Search Store. The Kindle version includes the full text of all Xconomy stories delivered to your device wirelessly and automatically, every weekday.
4. Xconomy Mobile
This one isn’t quite as new—we actually launched it back in August—but we thought we’d remind you about it. If you open a browser on your mobile phone and go to www.xconomy.com, you’ll automatically be redirected to the mobile version of our site, which is optimized by Mofuse for viewing on a small screen. (You can also get to the mobile site directly at m.xconomy.com.) If you click on the “All Stories” link on the main page of the mobile site, you can then click through to full-text versions of all of our stories (just like you’d get on the Kindle). You can also browse by city and topic.
5. E-mail and RSS
These really aren’t new—we’ve offered them since we launched Xconomy in 2007. But while our e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds are extremely popular (we reach at least as many people through these mechanisms as we do through the website), we still talk to many readers who aren’t aware of them. To sign up for daily e-mails with Xconomy headlines and stories, or to add Xconomy to your RSS readers such as Netvibes or Google Reader, just go to our Email – RSS page. You can choose newsletters and RSS feeds specific to our cities (Boston, San Diego, or Seattle) or key topics (life sciences, information technology, nanotechnology, energy, people, venture capital, and my World Wide Wade column) that most interest you. Or you can just sign up to get all of our stories. (That’s our favorite option!)
