On my way to work this morning I was, as usual, sat on the train listening to podcasts that got synced to my Zune overnight. I looked around me and noticed that everyone else was either listening to their iPods or, in the case of the majority, reading a newspaper. That's when I had a brainwave. Wouldn't it be cool if I picked up my Zune every morning and it had all the latest local and international news stories synced to it ready for me to read or watch on the way in?

The days of dead-tree-based "newspapers" are numbered. If you want proof of that then consider that I walked into work yesterday and I was the only person there that knew about the earthquake in China that had happened about 30 minutes earlier. Why was that? It was because I was reading about it on Twitter before the news agencies even knew anything about it. Newspapers have it even worse - by the time you're reading about something in a newspaper its already old news - the newspaper got printed hours ago. Up to the minute, free, news feeds are the future and my startling realisation this morning was that I already had a device that was capable of being that digital news reader. The only thing required to fill the gap now is software.

Live Mesh could fill that gap very nicely. Imagine a software application that collected news stories for me that it thinks I would be interested in (based on my interests and previous reading habits) while I'm busy at work or even as I sleep. Now imagine that those news stories are available to me on whichever device I happen to have in my hand next. That's the promise of Mesh.

Traditional bricks-and-mortar media companies should be very scared indeed. If they aren't already.

-Jamie

P.S. I originally published this idea on the Zune forums before I realised that, actually, this is more about Mesh than about Zune.