Regular readers may know that one of the things I find most fascinating is people who are trying to change interfaces: switching around the way we input information and the way it is pumped out to us.
So it was with great interest that I read BoingBoing's Mark Frauenfelder, who has an article in Mobile Magazine about a way of reading on small screens called RSVP ("rapid serial visual presentation"), which works by displaying the words of an article, on their own, in sequence.
You can try reading text RSVP-style by going to the RSVP demo on our website. Adjust the speed by moving the slider bar to the left or right.
B.J. Fogg would be happy to hear this. He runs research and design at Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab. Fogg's been using RSVP for four years and has launched a research project called BuddyBuzz, which lets mobile users read articles from the internet using RSVP. Using BuddyBuzz, Fogg claims he can read 700 words a minute. At that rate, you could read a novel in about an hour and a half, if your phone battery doesn't give out. (I can handle up to about 300 words a minute before I go into a fugue state.)
Take a look at the demo mentioned above - I found the reading fairly easy, if a little disjointed. I don't know what it would be like for reading novels, but it certainly would make it possible to read short news articles very simply indeed.
Since looking at the demo, I've tried setting up an account with Buddybuzz - but at the moment it's telling me it can't connect my phone to the server (or "Beehive"). Is that because I'm in the UK? I'm not sure, but I'll try and find out some more.
