Maybe mobile's the next big thing, and always will be

Catching up to two posts from mocoNews.net:

• Is mobile advertising the next big thing?: In the United States, at least, mobile ads remain hobbled by the persistence of multiple incompatible networks and technologies.
• NBCU Wireless GM On iPhone: 'We Didn't Feel That We Had To Be There On Day One': Sure, it's cool to say you built iPhone-compatible editions of all your sites, but isn't a decently designed regular Web site already there?

I keep telling my corporate news media colleagues we are not "behind" on mobile as long as we ensure a few things:

• The corpus of our content remains portable enough, and flexible enough, to be "poured" into any interface or format.
• We think beyond the current corpus of our content into storytelling forms that do or will make sense in mobile devices. Experimentation here costs little, and that's good because the payoff may be far away at best.
• We do not lock ourselves into any exclusive carrier, service provider or content provider relationships in the mobile field.
• We do not attempt to go it alone. We own no carriers, cannot engineer reliable cross-platform messaging or data services ourselves, and cannot expect people to go hunting for our local mobile presences by tapping on a 10-key pad.
• We follow the money. If advertising revenue in mobile lives at the top layers of mobile data decks, we need partnerships that will put us there, too. If it shifts to messaging services, we need relationships there. If clamshell phones give way to larger smartphone designs as the low common denominator, we need to adjust our thinking regarding the ad form factors that will work.
• We don't scattershoot. We will exhaust ourselves trying to chase every incremental technology innovation, especially as long as the field remains overcrowded with inventors solving problems no one has.

What's your mobile strategy?

Update (4:23 p.m. EDT, 7/22/08): Though not perfectly aligned with my logic here, I was interested to see today that, in the United Kingdom, social networking on mobile hasn't caught up to e-mail and Web use.