My favourite app on my iPad is easily Flipboard. In fact, stop reading and install it right now, if you haven’t already. There are Android and iPhone apps as well. I just wish they were charging money for it, but that’s a topic for another day.

When I’m using it I find I read a lot of articles from The Guardian and The Economist. In fact, pretty much every time I pull the app out, I’ll find something interesting to read from one of those newspapers. As there is no desktop Flipboard app, when I’m looking for something to read at my laptop, I’ve started going to The Guardian’s web site. And I’ve noticed something interesting.

I’m very rarely finding more than one article on their home page that interests me enough to read. This is weird. The content is there and I like it. But I can’t find it while idly browsing — which is what I want to do.

Is this just a problem with the Guardian’s web site? Well, I find the same thing when I check The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. But I don’t have this problem when I look at the Economist.

That’s interesting. My theory is that it’s something to do with publishing cycles. The Economist has a weekly cycle, the rest are daily. But I don’t quite understand how Flipboard is finding the articles that interest me. Is it the significantly better user experience? Or do they target the longer-form content?

In the meantime, would Flipboard please release a desktop web app? Because something that isn’t just doom, gloom and death could be about to happen in the world of old media publishing.