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February 27, 2005
Blogging 101 - Moblogging
By Matt Wood in Blogging 101
Mo' Bloggin'! Mo' Bloggin'! Mo' Bloggin'!
Blog is such a ridiculous word. It always makes me think of something you might do after a night of hard drinking ("I really hit it off with this girl at the party, but then I blogged all over her sweater"). To make it worse, the word has mutated into other forms with equally nauseous connotations: blogroll (something you might find in the deli next to the head cheese), blogosphere (a geeky euphemism for a toilet bowl), and my favorite, moblogging. It's twice as much blogging! It's blogging with guys named Mo! Say it fast enough and you can't help thinking of the old "Homeboy Shopping Network" skits on In Living Color with Damon and Keenan Ivory Wayans. But stupid name notwithstanding, moblogging is one of the more exciting approaches to creating Dan Rather's favorite kind of website.
What is Moblogging?
The strict definition of moblogging is posting blog entries from a mobile device,
in absence of a computer and standard blogging interface. Traditionally this
involves posting pictures and brief descriptions from a camera phone or PDA.
But as the concept gains popularity and the creators of blogging software build
more functionality into their tools, moblogging is a blanket term for being
able to blog anything from anywhere, at any time. Now you can publish more than
just grainy snaps from a camera phone when you're away from a computer. You
can send messages from an email or SMS client. You can even post video clips,
or record a voice message as an MP3. If blogging is the future of journalism,
then moblogging is the new version of man on the street reporting. It's the
ultimate way to capture a crime in progress, to quote a politician's press conference
verbatim, or document that chance meeting with Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen
at the club and transmit it to the world immediately.
How Does a Moblog Work?
There are three requirements for moblogging: 1) capture the content (text and/or
images), 2) send it to your web server sans traditional computer, and 3) publish
it on the site. Until recently this wasn't such an easy task. The key component
here is the ability to take the data sent in an email and post it to a blog.
The trick is to configure a secret mail account on the blog server that is to
be used only for posting. A blogger composes a message, attaches a picture,
and emails it to this address that only he knows. An automated script monitors
this mailbox for messages, and posts them to the blog as they arrive. Until
recently, most blogging platforms didn't have the built-in capability to post
via email, and truly mobile blogging could only be accomplished by dedicated
hackers with the wherewithal to write their own scripts and cron jobs to process
email posts.
How Do I Get a Moblog?
Textamerica was one of the first full-featured moblogging services. It is
geared specifically toward camera phone users, and still offers an impressive
array of customizable features. But it requires setting up a separate site that
exists within their environment. Now all the most popular blogging platforms
offer mobile capabilities out of the box so you can integrate a moblog into
an existing site, right next to your reviews of The OC. Hosted services
like SixApart's TypePad and Blogger have the most comprehensive
features because the heavy lifting of moblogging, the magical scripty stuff
that turns emails into blog posts, is maintained on their own servers. Users
don't have to configure their own plugins or scripts.
TypePad is by far the most robust platform for would-be mobloggers. You can post text and photos from any device capable of sending email. You can configure special display templates for content posted via mobile devices, or assemble images into customized albums. SixApart has also teamed with Nokia to integrate with Nokia's Lifeblog software. Lifeblog lets users keep a personal journal of images and text messages on their cell phones, and synchronize this with a PC. Lifeblog content can also be posted directly to TypePad from a phone or the desktop. Blogger also turns a number of moblogging tricks, including a feature called AudioBlogger. Ever felt the urge to blog something but you can't write it down? With AudioBlogger, you can essentially leave a voicemail on your blog, and it publishes it to your site as an MP3. The folks at Blogger say, "It's fun at parties." Drunk dialing is redefined. TypePad's big brother, the original Movable Type, doesn't support moblogging out of the box, but it can be added with various plugins. WordPress and b2evolution, popular open-source blogging platforms, offer email-posting abilities, but also require special plugins to handle additional content like pictures.
Photo sharing services also enable moblogging features, and can serve as a slick go-between for people who don't use hosted blogging services like TypePad. Flickr, the wildly popular hybrid of photo sharing and social networking created by Ludicorp, is the 800-pound gorilla in this arena. Flickr users can post photos to their account with any email-capable device. It displays the newest images in a user's "photostream" chronologically as they are added, and people can add titles, descriptions, metadata tags, and leave comments on images, so the user's account home page can serve as an impromptu photoblog on its own. But Flickr doesn't stop there. You can configure a Flickr account to post images directly to your blog, provided your platform uses a standard publishing protocol. Flickr users can publish photos from their stream to any Blogger, Movable Type/TypePad, LiveJournal, or Manila site, or any site that uses the Blogger, Atom, or MetaWeblog API (which includes WordPress). Additionally, Flickr users can configure a second email address that first posts a photo to their photostream, then posts it to a blog. This way Flickr handles much of the dirty work for bloggers who don't use a hosted platform like TypePad. Flickr also offers a number of scripts that bloggers can use to display images on their site, in effect creating moblog sidebars or "badges" if said images have been published on the go.
Moblogging is a great way to revive a dying blog, or to liven up even the most active one. The ability to post snapshots from a party or jot a quick email to your site extends blogging to anywhere you might find inspiration. It's both liberating and addictive. Mo' bloggin' indeed.
- By Matt Wood
Blogging 101 publishes every Sunday and provides blogging tips, advice and tutorials for blog newbies and veterans alike.
Quixtarily Mobloggingly googilly didly fiddly. quixtarily blogingly bombly, googly spankily harderly. Quixtarily weapily diddly. Google still no likely but MO is happily everly afterly.
Moral: Moblogginly godily real blogily, no fakily blogilly. blogly karmaly strikely backely.
Posted by: MO | March 2, 2005 1:10 AM