Comments on: The State of Mobile Blogging: It Ain’t Pretty

By: Jenn

Jenn — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:21:36 +0000

CellSpin (www.cellspin.net) support mobile Blogging for all smartphones, you can do photo blogging, audio blogging, video blogging and plain old Text blogging … They have an mobile app for Windows mobile , Nokia, iPhone, Palm OS, Blackberry and more …

By: Ron

Ron — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:14:58 +0000

Telewaving.com released a new version of Wavelog just a week ago. It’s a totally new application. Supports categories, taggs, resizing photos, embedding videos, even mixing wordpress with youtube and picasaweb if one can’t upload to the blog server directly. What’s the most important for me is HTML editing and editing previously published posts. The best of all is that you may setup several blog providers, so if you have more than one blog, it’s a peace of cake to publish posts while on the move. I actually don’t carry my laptop anymore, and now I can blog while riding my VTT… I suggest you to try the free trial and you’ll forget opera mini. You don’t want to be online all the time especially if in roaming.

By: Furie

Furie — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:43:36 +0000

I’ve been mobile blogging for a couple of years now. Set up my own CSS, uploaded images, made all my posts all from my phone.

Two words – Opera Mini.

By: Christian Borrman

Christian Borrman — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:13:07 +0000

Hi,

Blogging on the mobile was easy, if you had a nokia, I decided to cover last year’s (2007) Symbian Smartfone show, from a symbian smartfone as an experiment on how easy it was,

http://christian-borrman.typepad.com/

and I have to say, once I had read up on typepad’s instructions, and reluctantly paid up my x dollars per month, it worked.

It even seamlessly worked with switch from N95 to N95 8GB

But then Nokia got all Ovi, and now lifeblog links all lead to Nokia Photos, which is simply not the same.

As Ricky says above, typepad now has its own client now, which I have not tested.

there are also sites like moblog.net, however, in this day and age, blogging by SMS, MMS and email is just… well it ain’t pretty as you say.

I will check out wavelog now, that Heike recommends…

By: Christian Cawley

Christian Cawley — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:28:16 +0000

I’ve been looking a this myself recently, and have found that as good as email posting is, if you’re doing it from your Windows Mobile Outlook app and posting to a WordPress installation, you risk seeing the formatting characters on the WordPress blog. The only way around is to use GMail or Hotmail.

Other blogging solutions are better served, so even 7 months on the situation is pretty dire.

By: jonaha

jonaha — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:28:04 +0000

you should try tumblr.com and brightkite

By: Adam Bird

Adam Bird — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:43:06 +0000

Hi Dan.

You might fancy trying out BlogIt, Esendex’s new, free, mobile blogging service: http://www.esendex.com/en/UK/Services/Blog-It/?

You set it up with some credentials that allow posting to your existing blog. Then, when you want to post, you just send an SMS to 07786 204 255 (you may notice it’s a Vodafone number :) ) to have it automagically appear on your blog.

Would really welcome your feedback.

Adam

By: Carl Uminski

Carl Uminski — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:03:17 +0000

Dan, try out http://trutap.com – once you install the app (m.trutap.com), you can post to Blog.com, blogger, flickr, typepad, photobucket and more from a really simple interface. You can also IM from the app as well.

By: Matsu

Matsu — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:58:58 +0000

Has anyone tried Wavelog with phone other than N95? I’m wondering if it would work with E61 or E62…

By: Daniel Appelquist

Daniel Appelquist — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:04:29 +0000

Thanks to everyone who left comments on this post, by the way! There seems to be a great deal of interest in this topic. For my own part, I forgot Kyte.tv which offers a kind of mobile blogging/podcasting service. Daniel Graf showed off Kyte at the most recent Mobile 2.0 and it was widely regarded as way cool.

By: Daniel Appelquist

Daniel Appelquist — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:00:15 +0000

Paul — Although I think it sounds good in theory, this will have the same problem that Spinvox has — transcoding errors. Now, if I can review and correct my spoken blog comment before posting it that might help. But it would still be awkward to do this in a public setting like a bus or train.

By: Daniel Appelquist

Daniel Appelquist — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:03:58 +0000

Hans — I think your service is cool, but I see one big problem with it: you have to give out your mobile number in order to use the service. So anyone who reads your blog now knows your mobile number. Might there be some way to configure it with a hashed or otherwise anonymous string, or with a string of my choice?

By: Hans Lysglimt

Hans Lysglimt — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:22:52 +0000

You might want to check out our new free instant SMS blogging service launched this week in beta.

You send any SMS to out gateway in the U.K. and your blog is instantly created on this url:

http://www.glimt.com/yourphonenumber

We think this is pretty cool, we made it simple and basic so anyone can experiment with different uses.
Tell us what you think!
Thanks.

Hans
Glimt.com

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:45:14 +0000

What do you think of being able to comment on a blog via mobile – instead of typing you’d record a sound file and upload it? Would you support that kind of functionality Dan? Perhaps even create blog posts by recording direct to the blog instead of any writing?

By: alfie

alfie — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:30:20 +0000

Mobile blogging can be hard. It’s a fact. Applications that are pre-configured to post to your preferred host are great, but there are issues using it on Java only handsets. For me, this is where MMS actually comes into it’s own.

MMS has always been a poor cousin to SMS, I think because psychologically, when you send an MMS, what do you get back? 99% of the time it’s either nothing or an SMS. That’s because the recipient is like “cool, but what, do I have to send a picture/video back?”.

MMS is the best method of mobile blogging simply because it’s native, interoperable with all networks (even internationally), and is just about the same as sending an SMS and so ease of use is the key. Factor in that many contracts and even PAYG users often have an MMS allowance per month and it stands out as the best way to moblog.

The trick to using MMS as an effective method of mobile blogging is to have an authentication/registration system as standard on the backend of whatever system/host you want to blog to. i.e. why not write a WordPress script that accepts an anonymous MMS, sends you an SMS asking you to confirm your username and password, and upon validation then allows any further MMS’s to be published directly to your blog. Not a hard thing to write, any WordPress coders lurking out there.

This is the system we use on our latest iteration of the Participation Toolkit ( http://moblogtech.com/products/participation-toolkit/ ) at The Big Art Mob. ( http://www.bigartmob.com )

An anonymous user sends an MMS, we send them a text back with registration details, validate the MSISDN, and voila, they have a blog they can post to forever using that mobile number. This is limited to the UK since The Big Art Mob is a UK project, but there’s no issue in allowing international MSISDN recognition.

So mobile blogging can be hard, or it can be super easy, it just takes a bit of thought as to what people actually want to do and finding the easiest way to do that securely.