Betavine (Vodafone R&D’s developer community portal), with some help from the inimitable folks at Carsonified, have laucnhed a new blog dedicated to Mobile Widgets and Web Apps.  The idea is to get as much information out as possible about what Betavine and Vodafone are doing in the widget space and what’s going on with the latest widget standardization efforts. We’ll also be featuring information on upcoming events, like the W3C widget camp at WWW2009 in Madrid next week and the upcoming Vodafone Mobile Widget Camp in Amsterdam on May 2nd. We’ll also be posting on Twitter on @MobileWidgets on Twitter. Stay tuned!

The mobile app also let’s you take photos, a feature that I am testing in this post, so more on how well that works later. [Update: there was an error sending the picture so some bugs still need to be worked out.]

On the downside, the app doesn’t have any spelling tools (actually a problem with all iPhone apps). The auto-correction software built into the iphobe can be both a blessing and a curse in this regard, both fixing up obvious mistakes and introducing insidious errors you don’t catch until it’s too late. (iPhone 2.0 has started to auto-correct ‘its’ as ‘it’s’ which can be particularly problematic).

One wish-list item for me would be geo-tagging of posts using the Skyhook-supplied location platform demonstrated at this month’s Mobile Monday London (and built in to the iPhone). I doubt even Skyhook, though, could locate me 200 feet below Tottenham Court Road. One more note on location: all iPhone apps now prompt the user for permission when they try to locate you. I believe this is a function of the underlying software – and if that’s the case then it’s good news for location privacy It’s not clear to me though whether the application must ask every time or if this is a one-time thing – that should be made more clear in the wording of the prompt.

So I’ve been doing some research on mobile blogging, trying to find the best solutions out there. The situation is pretty dire. So far, it looks like the best solution out there is actually from Windows Live (née MSN) Spaces. Windows Live actually lets you register, create a blog and start publishing it all through the mobile browser.

In contrast, Blogger has some information on mobile blogging that involves a convoluted “email to post” (which only works with U.S. carriers by the way — HELLO PEOPLE – THE WEB IS GLOBAL). TypePad claims “industry leading” mobile features but doesn’t seem to have any way to sing up or create a blog from the mobile and it’s also e-mail based. You can use Nokia Lifeblog with Typepad but you need to have a Nokia phone to do this. WordPress is likewise a wash. Vox doesn’t have obvious mobile support either.

What’s going on here? It’s pretty easy to write a Web form that accepts a blog post. Even Microsoft can do it! I thought we were further along here, as a society I mean. Am I missing something? Are there other turn-key solutions out there for mobile blogging?

But adult content is not the only possible application for content labels. For example, a content label can tell you whether a Web site is accessible (has it followed the W3C’s WAI guidelines?). A content label can tell you if the content is appropriate for educational needs. A label can also tell you if content is mobile friendly, and that’s the theory underlying the work that the Mobile Web Best Practices working group is undertaking with mobileOK. Content labels can also be an important enabler in the field of content search and discovery, particularly on the mobile Web. This is what Google mobile sitemaps (for example) are all about — explicitly telling the search engine (the content discovery agent) about the content so the user doen’t have to wade through pages of search results to find what they’re looking for.

So it’s clear that a number of industry requirements are converging on the idea that some kind of metadata will be fed upstream from content providers to browsers and content discovery agents. But can these content labels be built on top of open, inter-operable standards? And will they be trustable? These are some of the questions that the Web Content Labels incubator group (WCL-XG) has sought to answer. This group is likely going to transform into a fully fledged W3C working group some time in the new year in order to develop its initial recommendations into a new W3C standard. This standard could enable a whole ecosystem of labeled content, labeling authorities and label verification services. You can already see glint of how this could work by downloading the Search Thresher Firefox plugin.

Bottom line: content labels built on top of open standards mean more machine-readable data on the Web, which translates to better user experience and ease of use. Verification of these labels mean a more trustable Web. Labels are definitely coming into the mainstream. I fully expect content labels to be a ubiquitous within the next two years — users won’t necessarily even know they exist, but they will be silently improving the trustability and usability the Web. If you want to be ahead of the curve, hop to ICRA.org’s label generator and generate yourself an ICRA label.

It may not seem like such a big deal, but this is the first time I’ve managed to successfully write a blog post of any signifigant length from a mobile device. Yet another sign that the mobile Web is coming of age.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/17/mobile_2_zero_event/

http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/11/mobile20_great.html

http://jlarienza.blogspot.com/2006/11/mobile-20-san-francisco.html (in Spanish)

http://gigaom.com/2006/11/07/mobile-20/

I was particularly impressed with the coverage in the Register. They never print anything positive about anything, so we must have done something right. If you attended the event and you wrote about it on your blog or took pictures, please leave a comment or trackback on the mobile2.0 event blog, here.

Now — I say the wp-mobile plug-in is cool, and it is, but there is a big problem with it, and that has to do with, what else, device detection. The plug-in knows you’re browsing from a mobile device because it matches the user-agent string against a list of strings that are hard-coded into the PHP program. If you read my previous post on Device Description Nirvana or are familiar with the work of the MWI Device Descriptions working group, then you’ll know that this issue of device descriptions is a thorny one. In the world of device description nirvana, this plug-in would use an API to query a global database of user agent strings to definitively determine if the incoming request is from a mobile device or not. More importantly, it would be able to use the capabilities of these devices to make intelligent decisions about how best to adapt the page for that particular device. Until that time, however, I wonder if some enterprising soul will at least integrate this plug-in with the WURFL open-source project.

Actually, I’ve been saying for some time what Barbara essentially is saying in her post: mobile-specific user experience is essential the growth of the Web on the mobile platform. My vision of the “One Web,” however, encompasses this idea through the notion of (ta da) “thematic consistency,” which has been articulated nicely by the Mobile Web Best Practices working group. Thematic consistency does not mean you have to have the same page displayed across different devices — it allows for different user experience across different devices but asserts that the same URI when viewed on different devices should provide thematically similar results (for example, the same news article or blog post).

So — even though I hold Barbara in very high regard, I disagree with the articulation of the “two camps.” From my perspective, the two camps might be closer to “the browser can do it all” vs. “the content authors need to do something too.” Clearly, I’m in the second camp: Web sites need to start factoring in Mobile users when they design and build their services, not as an after-thought. I think this is already happening. Take a look at PinPPL — here’s a site that’s designed to work well on the Blackberry browser and on desktop browsers. The site itself, a social network for Blackberry users, also exploits device capabilities by providing direct access to Blackberry PIN messaging from user profiles.

By the way, Barbara will be speaking at the next Mobile Monday London event here on October 2nd. Don’t miss it!

Meanwhile, BBC News ran a great article on the rise of the Mobile Web. I think this article does a great job of capturing the user attitude towards the mobile Web: they just want it to work. (This article also reinforces my view that cost transparency is a key issue when it comes to take up.)