James – Thanks for the comments. I don’t doubt your passion or the benefits you hope to provide with your developer resources, but I find it hard to reconcile with most everything else mTLD has done to this point.

In one part of your article you reflect on the disappointing uptake of mobile in the mass market.

The reason I took on the opportunity at dotMobi is that I truly believe that the .mobi domain can be a way to kick start that consumer acceptable of the medium.

The yeast that might mix with all the other mobile ingredients (that mostly already exist!) to make the bread rise.

If dotMobi is viewed as a domain-selling exercise only, it may be hard to see how that can be the case. But we have a lot of initiatives underway (some very young!) to supplement that and help make the mobile web a success.

So for example, we have the mobiReady report at http://mr.dev.mobi. Not perfect (yet!) but a valuable tool for checking the chances that a site will work on mobile.

And then there’s our fledgling development community at http://dev.mobi. It’s designed to be an independent set of resources, forums, and tools for web developers tackling mobile.

Now, if one is a mobile veteran, some of this may seem familiar, and maybe even uneccessary. But we think it’s important to bring expertise in the mobile arena to a broader and broader audience of regular web developers in order to bootstrap the mobile web.

And there’s so much more for us to do, and lots more on the way. Watch this space.

But I think we’re working hard – in our own way – to make this medium (that you are clearly passionate about!) a success.

Almost everythng about it is unfinished and poorly thought through. Just simple stuff, like configuring settings, requires serious gadgetry skills.

The Windows phones and PDAs are much easier to use.

I like Nokia phones (I have N70 for personal use), but E61 is their first qwerty and it’s “ruff”.

ShoZu, Opera Mini, and Goggle Maps are all good picks thou’.

Photo by Rick Takagi Some rights reserved.
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