This is important to us in terms of reader access. Up until now, to read our stuff, you had to either print it out or sit at a computer screen. It was tough to read us on the train, in the doctor's office, or, well, that little room where most literary content is consumed. Now, we can be read anywhere a print magazine can - and with backlighting on handheld devices, you can even read our publications in the dark.

Ah, but what about advertising? Well, right now it's an experiment. We're including ads from all our online sponsors (those with text-based ads, not banners) in the Mobile Editions at no additional charge. We know tons and tons of people are getting the Mobile Editions because our internal servers got flooded with users (more on that in a few moments). But while readers of the Mobile Editions can read the ads, they can't click and be taken to an advertiser's site.

And so, all of a sudden, we're in a new media with a traditional media problem. With the Mobile Editions, just like with a paper-based magazine, we can no longer track exactly how people are interacting with the ads. We know how many people are getting the Mobile Edition, but not which articles they're reading or which ads they want to click through.

It's an interesting new venue. Of all the folks with mobile-based publications (and these include people like C|NET, ZD, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal), we're running the most ads with the most advertisers. As we learn more about this interesting new media, we'll let you know what we learn.

Underestimating demand
One thing did become apparent shortly (and I mean within hours) after we launched: now we underestimated demand.

I honestly figured this to be a grand experiment. After all, we publish magazines about handheld technology so it's a good idea to try it out for ourselves. We built the ZENPRESS extensions and started generating pages about three months ago. We quietly posted a notice on the PowerBoards and a smattering of readers downloaded pages and sent us feedback. As a result, we tuned and tweaked the service, getting it ready for a public launch.

But I honestly figured only a small bunch of people would read the thing. After all, handheld devices have very small screens. So I figured that only the most active enthusiasts would go this route. OK, so I was wrong.

I also hadn't properly predicted how our servers would react.

Let's back up a minute to understand how AvantGo pages are managed. When you sign up, you download all of the given channel that the AvantGo spider believes should be sent to you. Then, when you synchronize again later, it only downloads those pages that have changed.

In our structure, we have a main, mobile home page for each publication. That page has four links: news, current issue, sponsors, and credits. The current issue link takes readers to a table of contents page containing listings of all the articles in the issue. That page, in turn, takes a reader to each of (typically nine) articles in the issue.