CBC.ca – an example of proper online presence

I’ve had a new-fangled smart phone for the past 4 months now, and I’ve been using it to read the news whenever I’m on a bus, or train. I’ve found that some sites understand their audience better than others. After looking into it some more, I realized that by far the best of these sites is CBC.ca. So, here are some things that makes CBC a very cutting edge site – or web 2.0!

iPhone Awareness

Considering the fact that the iPhone is the fastest selling mobile in history – with a quarter million sold in Canada last year (after being on sale for only 3 months) and around 7 million sold worldwide – it’s a good move to cater a news site to this device thus bringing readership over.

CBC has done that well, and it’s not just the pages that are formatted for the iPhone. Even the media is offered in an iPhone friendly format if you visit the site from that device.

Acknowledging Other OSes

I was listening to the live radio feed yesterday when I noticed instructions for all 3 major Operating Systems on the market. And they even have an experimental Ogg Vorbis stream!

Use Of Social Networking

Online content providers have been making their sites more and more social over the last year or so. Various sites do it to varying degrees. CBC has a good mix of features:

• Their stories as well as their commenting systems use ratings.
• They have also added Facebook Connect, although it seems to be in experimental mode right now.

In my opinion, the only thing missing from their site is options to share stories over social bookmarking and similar sites. For example, The Independent allows users to post their stories directly to reddit, digg and other sites.

All in all, these efforts make my visits to CBC.ca enjoyable and makes me come back more often!