Nick Piggott blogged last week about low consumer take-up levels of interactivity. He cited examples of “press the red button” opportunities during ad breaks on satellite television and URL calls-to-action in radio adverts.

When people are either enjoying what they were already doing or busy with something else (such as driving the car), then even if they are interested in the product or feature being promoted, they just can’t act on it then.

Nick’s argument is that there needs to be a way to bookmark or tag the opportunity so that you can return to it later.

I travel a lot, and I like my travelling time to be as productive as possible. My laptop is always with me and I answer emails, write reports, and watch downloaded TV programmes whenever I have a few moments spare on a train, plane or boat (I live on the Isle of Wight).

My current commute involves a lot of time on crowded tube trains. A tube train isn’t a great place for a laptop, particularly if it’s standing room only, so the web browser on my mobile phone (an O2 XDA) comes in useful then. I particularly like to keep up-to-date with my RSS subscriptions using Google Reader Mobile.

Sometimes there are posts which include embedded video, a link to a mobile-unfriendly website, or which simply provoke the thought “I must read up on that a bit more”. I tag those stories with ‘Add Star’ in Google Reader so that I can return to them later when I’m back in front of a larger screen.

What we all need, and what Nick is advocating, is ‘Add Star’ for everything else in life.

Incidentally, Google recently announced Google Gears, which allows you to read RSS feeds in Google Reader when you are disconnected. Separately, they have announced Google Gears for mobiles. Frustratingly, they haven’t yet married the two and given us a Google Gears-enabled version of Google Reader Mobile. I hope it’s on the way. A lot of my tube journey is spent underground, and then it’s back to Solitaire.

Photo: Laihiu on Flickr. Used under licence.