Brighton-based Nectar Digital has hit the right rhythm with its mobile phone-based poetry service.

Poem-me.com offers a subscription service delivering poems five days a week direct to users' mobile phones or by email.

Fredrik Lloyd, one of the site's co-founders, said the poems, which have to be less than 160 characters long because of the restrictions of text-messaging, were helping make poetry more accessible to a broad range of people.

He said: "The idea is to move poetry off the shelves and into daily life.

"Poetry is entertainment. Lots of my poetry uses humour because it disarms people - it catches them with their defences down and the closer you get to them, the more willing they are to listen."

Users pay to subscribe for one or three months, during which they receive a poetic message every weekday.

Mr Lloyd has chosen more than 60 poems, mainly based on the theme of winter but including a weekly love poem, from a collection of 300.

He said two-thirds of the 200 current subscribers were getting a poem sent to their phones and a similar number were subscribing for the longer period.

After Christmas, the web site will be offering new, yet to be finalised, services in the same way, possibly involving additional contributors.

Mr Lloyd said: "We might introduce something like Thought For The Day but it is still under discussion."

Nectar is working with Brighton-based digital media specialist Lighthouse on a project called Memo, which focuses on story-telling and how people memorise things.

Mr Lloyd said: "We are looking at how people tell stories to each other and how truths develop into myths.

"We're interviewing older people for the project and listening to their views.

"This broadens the scope of what you can do and say and is helping us to creating a tapestry of stories on the internet."

www.poem-me.com