Twelve Black Code Monkeys

James Doohan, who played the Stark Trek Scottish chief of engineering on the 60’s show and subsequent movies, had a “farewell convention” this last weekend. When I learned about it this morning I was surprised, as I hadn’t known that Doohan had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease a while back. This convention was to honor his career and his life amongst family, colleagues, and friends, and I can imagine being a very bittersweet occasion. It’s of course tragic to see anyone deal with a veritable death sentence, and one that robs one in the process of faculty. Knowing that this is inevitable must be extremely painful both for the victim and those around him. Yet this “farewell” is a way to acknowledge the inevitable and leave at least those other than Doohan himself with the lasting memory that towards the end of his life he was showered with love. I can’t imagine what Doohan must be thinking at such an event. I don’t know how much the disease had progressed at this point, but if it is still relatively early, which I assume, it must be something akin to attending your own funeral. Whether this is a good thing or not, I don’t know. Often when we are faced with the inevitable, it does bring a certain amount of peace, whereas uncertainty usually only causes anxiety. In any case, the icon that Doohan created in Scotty (with the help of Gene Roddenberry) is sure to live on in the minds and hearts of all of the Trekkies or Trekkers out there both young and old. Wil Wheaton has included a speech he gave about Doohan at the convention on his blog, which, as usual, says quite a bit.

Gizmodo by way of TreoCentral has the first real pictures of the Treo Ace, or as they are calling it the ‘Treo 650′, the successor to the current Treo 600. It looks good, although not dramatically different. The keyboard seems to be the major design change. The keys look larger and/or flatter. The entire key is backlit instead of just the letter on it. They have also moved the ‘menu’ and ‘home’ buttons up to the top above the five-way navigation, which should make these often-used buttons easier to isolate. They’ve also made the alt key its own key as opposed to being shared with the ‘0’ key. Hopefully that will mean that hitting 0 after some other letter will not launch a popup menu of special characters, as for me it has the tendency to do now. They’ve added an extra shift key on the left as well, but I use an application called Keycapps 600 that does away with the need for shift and alt in most circumstances. However, the number and special keys still are different from the normal computer keyboard layout, which makes things more difficult to find. It also looks like the screen is high-res as has been said before. There’s a lot of discussion about this over at TreoCentral, myTreo.net, and Engadget about this, so enjoy!

Update: There’s a rumor on TreoCentral that this unit will not work with any of the accessories made for the Treo 600. I can see cases not working exactly because of slightly different button layouts. But all accessories? The Treo 600 is pricey enough, ranging from $200 all the way up to $800 depending on whether you get it with a mobile phone plan or which plan you have and which provider you have. Acessories add up very quickly on top of this. This unit will no doubt carry the same premium because it, like the last one, will be in huge demand. Unless the phone companies subsidize the phone to a much greater level than the Treo 600, users who want to upgrade will be extremely upset and a lot of them will opt to hold out a lot longer. When the phone itself is so expensive, often one justifies the additional cost of accessories and software as being “investments” which can be carried onto future generations. For people buying high-end phones like the Treo 600, the desire to have the latest technology is a given and that comes at a hefty price. So it’s assumed that eventually one will upgrade, but to have to also upgrade every other accessory one has is a bit much. Get ready, PalmOne, because if this rumor turns out to be true than you will be dealing with a lot of very grumpy and some very irate users for the next 6 months.

Treocentral has a piece about how the Treo 600 is finally being offered by T-Mobile in their store outlets. Previously you had to order it through PalmOne (or earlier Handspring), although for the first five months after the T600 came out it simply wasn’t supported by T-Mobile. Apparently the earlier Treos did not sell all that well, and so T-Mobile was gun shy about offering yet another. This doesn’t surprise me at all about T-Mobile. It seems they are finally starting to understand that convergence devices that offer email, personal data synchronization with the PC, and huge amounts of utility via thousands of applications and hardware ad-ins doesn’t just apply to corporate users, but to lots of non-corporate but tech-saavy consumers. No, your average 18-year-old who wants a phone for ring-tones, text-messaging and talking with friends is not about to pay hundreds extra for this phone. I think T-Mobile’s marketing department has way too high opinion of themselves if they think that they can pigeonhole a demographic into a specific phone. They can do this by crippling the phone, or by not offering it, but then you risk driving the customer to a provider who does offer it. Maybe T-Mobile is finally learning to be more open in this respect???

Three women from Los Angeles just started a company called Carb Couture with the aim to defend their right to enjoy carbs. How silly is this? It is really sad when people feel so threatened by their environment that they have to declare their love of a food and right to eat it. I know, I come from the opposite place. Up until this year, or at most last year, my low carb ways were ridiculed by a majority of people as unhealthy. Now the tables have turned and those who eat lots of carbs are apparently getting the brunt of some people’s ire, at least in LA. I think what this shows mostly is that people shouldn’t be critical of other’s eating habits. Still, while I was being assailed by friends or colleagues as that wacky guy who used to be a vegetarian and is now on that “meat diet,” I didn’t make up T-shirts saying “If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?” No, it was a personal choice, one that I didn’t feel I had to defend to the world (just a few lucky friends and family members ). Hey, if these women want to talk about how they “love their carbs” more power to them. I love carbs too, they just don’t love me. They tolerate me at best.

Gizmodo has a review of the Sidekick II in addition to an accounting of some T-Mobile account problems. The review is ok, although it doesn’t really compare the unit to the previous Sidekick and may have a couple of inaccuracies. Nevertheless, it seems like it works well as long as you understand some of the inherent limitations.

As far as the problems with T-Mobile and their customer care, I can’t say that I have had too many issues with them myself, luckily. Normally if I have a problem I’m able to resolve it fairly quickly. The one time where this was not the case was when I first bought my first Sidekick back in November of 2002. The device was very new at the time, so there’s that excuse. However, here’s in a nutshell what happened. The Sidekick has a web interface to all your data on the phone which I thought would provide a much faster interface to entering stuff, etc. (as it turns out it wasn’t because the site can be pretty sluggish). This account has to be set up and linked to your regular T-Mobile account by T-Mobile. Mine was not and I started calling after a couple of days. I got people who were generally eager to help but ultimately couldn’t do much. Eventually one of them figured out something and I got access to it, after probably 2-3 weeks! All the others had tried something and then said to wait a few days to see if it worked. I am convinced that if I didn’t luck into getting this one rep who tried this one thing, I could have been waiting months!

Customer support seems to be a big issue with cell phone companies, and companies in general. It turns out that it is very costly and this is why companies have farmed their support to overseas, mainly India. While some people complain about this, I don’t mind it. Yes, there can sometimes be a language barrier, although it’s not exactly that. English is widely spoken in India, but is a heavily accented, so it can take a little time to understand sometimes. Of course when one is having problems with equipment, and already frustrated, there’s not a whole lot of room to be patient and forgiving. But I’ve never come across a rude Indian CSR Rep. Then again, I can’t remember the time I’ve come across a rude American CSR Rep. I realize I may be in the minority here, but I am never demanding or rude to a CSR person and I believe that usually is enough to prevent them from being rude to me. Of course I could also be living in la-la land here! What I don’t understand is if customer support is so expensive that we have to set up call centers halfway around the world in order to save money, why don’t companies simply design better products? This will save a lot of people calling in the first place. I know, there are inevitable issues with people not understanding more complex, technical devices, especially those who aren’t technical to begin with. All the better reason to invest in some great documentation, not the cryptic manuals which few read or idiot “quick start guides” that don’t answer any questions other than how to turn something on and the most basic of operating procedures.

With the mobile phone industry, there seems to be a particular issue with customer support. I was very happy to see a Sprint PCS commercial last night during the Olympics that actually made fun of the fact that new subscribers get all the benefits compared to current/long-time subscribers. This methodology should be made fun of and done away with. I kind of understand the motivation behind it, but maybe this is just conjecture. Basically, I’m thinking there are industry metrics that are reported in annual reports, quarterly reports, etc., which then theoretically help with the stock price. One of these metrics is new customers, while another is “churn” or people switching to someone else. The stock market has a growth fettish that can usually supercede everything else. Thus, it is reasoned that as many new customers must be had and if older customers have to be given the short stick, so be it. So, mobile phone companies offer sweet deals on new phones to lure new customers. The cost of the phone is actually “subsidized” by the mobile provider because they know they will be getting X amount of money from that new provider over a year’s contract. Some provider’s are a bit more enlightened and actually offer similar deals for people who extend their contract, but others, like T-Mobile, only offer something like free nights or free T-Mobile-to-T-Mobile calls if one renews one’s contract. Sprint has also come out with a plan that actually changes every month according to usage, so you don’t end up going over and paying exorbitant per-minute charges. But it seems all of these different pricing plans and methodologies have made billing issues multiply out of control. The industry, it seems, needs to standardize on some simple plan and stick to that. I think it should be the unlimited plan. You get one flat fee for unlimited calling. This would take 95% of the billing issues off the table and would save providers lots of time and expense trying to resolve these issues with customer support. This would allow them to decrease the cost of such an unlimited account.

The new telephone technology that may yet supercede current GSM and CDMA cell phones (or even their 3G predecessors), is Voice Over IP or “VOIP”. VOIP is a phone that uses the internet to communicate voice. It can translate between any analog (traditional) phone and the internet, so the only thing you need is a high-speed internet connection (DSL or a cable modem, etc.) and a little box that the VOIP company provides. Anyone can start a VOIP company in that you are only providing a box and a service, but not the wires or connection itself. So although we have all the large communications companies like AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, etc., jumping on the bandwagon, the pioneers of this technology have been small companies like Vonage, Broadvoice, and the like. This makes the environment potentially much more competitive and consumers have benefited by cheap rates and tons of features and unlimited calling rates. So far VOIP is taking over the landline phone market because you need to have a high-speed connection, and once you leave your house you no longer have access to that. However, a new wireless networking technology called Wimax could change all of that by offering a very high speed wireless connection that can be broadcast over large areas (measured in miles) much like current cell towers. Either Wimax will be a competitor to standard cellular, or it will be coopted by them, who knows, but the actual VOIP service as part of this theoretically could remain in the hands of anyone who wants to start such a service. The one thing that might foil much of this open competitiveness is that Wimax providers may decide to lock down the port(s) that VOIP uses unless one pays a toll or subscribes only to the network’s preferred VOIP service. In fact, I have heard that at least for HotSpot, the wireless internet service owned by T-Mobile that one can access at just about any Starbucks or Borders Books in the U.S., they have already done this. I can’t take my VOIP “adapter” into one of these locations and use it to talk to people. Of course the reasoning behind this, I’m sure, is that it could theoretically hurt T-Mobile’s mobile phone revenues, since if people can talk unlimited amounts any hour of the day and any day of the week, they can opt for a cheaper mobile phone plan and never go over in those minutes. This is all the better reason for all mobile providers to switch over to one unlimited plan model. Revenue can still be generated by the growing ringtone market, but eventually I think as a society we may need to consider whether mobile communications has become such a critical utility in our society that it should be regulated (at least to the point that it is subsidized by the government so that cheap unlimited access for basic voice communications can be had by all). The FCC has had to deal with so many complex issues and has bungled so many when it comes to creating more competition in order to lower prices. While I get more for my money than I used to on my cell, my monthly fees have only gone up. VOIP is the only service so far that has actually started SAVING me money, so I think the government needs to pay special heed to this industry and make sure that it’s model is not crushed by those who want to keep the control of personal communications in the hands of a few very large companies…

The web browser that comes with my phone, the Treo 600, is not a bad browser at all, at least compared to other alternatives. Many phones simply have a “WAP” browser, which can only display text, and not much of it at that. You cannot go to a regular web page with such a browser, the webmaster has to intentionally create a WAP version of the site. Even with my T-Mobile Sidekick, a device made for surfing the web among other things, one can’t get to a lot of sites because the browser won’t support JavaScript, Java Applets, or other such browser technologies. So when I got my Treo 600 I was delighted that Blazer, the browser that comes with the phone, was able to get to most sites and display them properly.

Being a web developer I’ve had the blessing of being used to higher-speed internet for a good 5 years now, maybe a little more. So using a mobile phone, especially one that uses the now aging standard of GPRS for its data communications, feels like going back in time. The fact is that GPRS only communicates at modem speeds. Thankfully, many phone browser solutions out there use what are known as “proxy servers” which serve as an intermediary between your phone and the website you want to view:

1. Your phone sends the proxy server a request to see a web page at GPRS (slow) speed
2. The proxy server, which is connected to the internet via a very fast connection, then retrieves the web page in an instant.
3. The proxy server then parses through the web page code looking for ways to make it smaller in size. So, for example, it takes images and shrinks them, and takes certain things your phone’s browser can’t display anyway, and gets rid of them. So a page that might originally be 100K in size shrinks to 10K or less.
4. The Proxy server finally sends the shrunken page back to your phone at GPRS speed.

So, in this way, the effective retrieval speeds for web pages are a lot faster than what a modem would offer, although it still can often feel a lot more sluggish than my T3 at work, or even a home DSL or a cable modem connection.

MyTreo.Net is one of the sites out there that I go to from time to time to talk about the Treo and to see what the newest hot programs are. They are unique, I think, in forging relationships with many developers so that the developers can put out their unfinished product to a select group of users and can then get feedback within the MyTreo message boards. This is how the new Chatter Email app has been handled.

In the same way, a Japanese company called Mobirus which has had an alternate web browser out for a while called Xiino, has been using a similar relationship to get a new version of their browser out in a condition that will suit Treo 600 users. I’ve tried their beta version of this browser out just a little and I can say that it is much faster than Blazer. It renders pages a little differently, opting to shrink graphics down so much that the page looks very similar to what it would look like on a regular screen. The problem is that because the Treo’s screen is so small, these images become tiny. While this isn’t a problem with some pages, many pages use images as navigational buttons. If they have text on them they become illegible and they are also hard to select. I also had a problem with some images just not coming up. Nevertheless, this was just released to the community and it looks like Mobirus is very active in attacking any and all issues that people are having, so I suspect a much more polished product will be available fairly soon.

I do sometimes feel like all this work will be made irrelevant within a fairly short period of time – a year or three? – since technology is such that there’s lots of leapfrogging going on. It could just be a lot sooner than we think that there’s ubiquitous ( and I mean really ubiquitous) high-speed wireless access in addition to devices that use flexible polymer screens that can be rolled up or folded into one’s pocket, but when unfolded can be as big as a standard monitor. I guess at least until then it will make a lot of people’s experience a lot better, it just seems sad that all this work will be made irrelevant one day. But I guess that’s true of a lot of things in technology and you can’t let this become a barrier to providing interim solutions. After all, something in how Mobirus gets their browser to work so quickly may yet be useful in some other application that we simply can’t predict right now. Well, maybe Mobirus can.

There’s certainly enough inane crap on TV these days, and the Olympics has never been a bastion of enlightenment in a see of darkness, with all it’s hyped up stories and blatant US favoritism. But come on!I was watching some of the coverage of the men’s gymnastics last night. They seem to have two experts who do a pretty good job of convincing you that they know what they are talking about. But for some reason NBC has chosen to throw in a third wheel. A general commentator that seems to have little background in the sport. He will say the obvious or worse – things that are completely unsubstantiated, just so that he can say something, since obviously he can’t really add anything useful.

I don’t know why it’s gotten to me so much, but it kind of ruins the whole experience to have some buffoon who has no idea what he’s talking about spout all kinds of nonsense just so there’s no “dead air” or because people need a more “human” angle rather than the actual technical details of the sport at hand. Ugh.

I’ve recently started using a new mail program that seems to satisfy almost all of my email needs for a phone. It is still in beta, but works very well and should get even better as the developer fixes things and hones it according to users’ suggestions. The program is called Chatter.

I bought a Treo 600 from a friend back in June and have been looking for an email application that would work in a way similar to my old phone, a Sidekick, and/or the famed corporate RIM Blackberry. These devices use a couple of features that make remote email retrieval really work well:

“Push” is a term used to denote that your email arrives at your device by the server sending it rather then you specifically telling your device to go check for email. One advantage is that you aren’t wasting time and battery power checking if there’s no new mail. An even bigger advantage is that when mail gets received by your mail server, it shows up on your device almost immediately. No waiting for the 5, 10 or 15 minute interval when your phone is set to go check for new mail.

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is just a method of communication between a mail server and your computer or phone, the “client.” In essence, with IMAP your mail program becomes a type of viewer of information that resides on the server. Many people use a different protocol, called POP, which normally retrieves your mail to a local machine or device. The problem with this is that once it’s retrieved off the server, if you home to read it on ANOTHER device, you can’t. With IMAP everything is kept online on the server and can be accessed my as many different methods as you want simultaneously. So I can be viewing mail on my desktop at work, go out for a walk and see the same exact mail on my phone. Everything is synchronized. If I send email on my phone, it gets put in my “sent items” and when I get back to the office, it’s right there in the folder named “sent items.” If I read a new message on my phone, it gets marked read on the server so when I get back to the office and look at my mail on my PC, again, it shows it has been read. And so forth. What this means is that you don’t have to worry about managing mail from one place to another. Everything is saved in a central location so whatever you do on whatever device you’re using, it’s immediately visible on all other devices. This may not seem like that big a deal to some, but for those of us who actually hold onto old email and want to keep a record of both sent and received mail, it takes a huge amount of the work and thinking out of the process. Back a few years ago before I knew of ways to get an IMAP account, I had to transfer a large outlook data file up to my web server each morning, download it when I got to work, then repeat the process for the trip back home. If I forgot or was not able to transfer stuff, I would have to open two outlook files simultaneously so that I could transfer the mail that wasn’t synched from the previous period. Now all of that becomes irrelevant!

The Treo was not made for these types of technology from the ground up. The PalmOS5 operating system that runs on the Treo does not do multithreading, so it has a hard time doing more than one thing at a time. There are probably a good dozen or so email applications out there for the Treo and I’ve tried many of them. They all have their advantages and disadvantages for the most part, and that’s probably why there isn’t one dominant one. But soon there may be, as you shall see. Here are a run down of the major contenders:

Palm’s Mail App: this is the program that comes with the Treo. It only does POP, but it is one of the few that can actually check for mail in the “background” – meaning while you are doing other things with the Treo, or while the Treo is “off.”

Versamail: PalmOne makes this application, which does IMAP but not push. It works reasonably well except that for the Treo, you really should be able to use the 5-way navigator buttons, but Versamail doesn’t support those yet. So you end up having to take out the stylus to do anything, and this becomes more effort than its worth. Another problem I have with Versamail is that there isn’t good product support. There are no online forums, and you have no idea when new versions might come out that would fix something. This is kind of a pet peave for me, but I really appreciate it when I can talk to the developer in some way.

MailWave: this is a new mail program that has some promise – it does IMAP and push, but as with most of the push solutions for the Treo, it isn’t real push, but a workaround using SMS. What happens is that Mailwave sits between your mailserver and your Treo. It actually retrieves your mail first and if it sees something new, it sends a text message to your phone. This has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that even if your phone isn’t getting a data signal, it can still receive these messages. The main disadvantage, I’ve found, is that these messages aren’t very reliable. Sometimes they come in immediately, sometimes they take 20 minutes or more, and sometimes they don’t come in at all. This may be a problem with T-Mobile’s implementation of SMS, or the local networks around here, who knows. The other issue is that if you are like me and receive a lot of email, you get barraged constantly with messages popping up on your phone which you then have to click ok to clear. Finally, the cost of Mailwave can get prohibitive – instead of charging a one-time fee for the application, they charge a monthly fee of $7. After 10 months, you’ve already spend more than the most expensive of the mail programs save for the truly corporate solutions. Mailwave does, unlike all but the corporate solutions, allow one to actually synch one’s calendar events if one Exchange account, like the Blackberry does. I’ll address Exchange in the Corporate Solutions section below. Program no longer available.

Snappermail: up until recently this was one of the better pop email programs. It outshines most of the programs out there because it has great support for both html email and attachments, which you can view or download via the program. A few months ago Snapper introduced a beta of its next version which included IMAP support. I have been primarily using this beta for the last month or so and it has worked fairly well for me. The two disadvantages are that when you send a message it doesn’t synch to your sent folder on your account, so you have to send a bcc to yourself and then manually put it in your sent folder when you get back to your PC (though some claim that their IMAP accounts have been smart enough to put it there automatically).

Corporate solutions: there are a number of high-end corporate applications/services out there that that are targeted at businesses more than individuals. They often involve installing applications on the server itself, and so really can only done by someone who has access to that server – in other words a systems administrator for a corporation. These solutions tend to be very pricey and aren’t a matter of simply installing a program on your phone and voila! But, these also have the advantage that they can synchronize more than just your email. Like the Blackberry, they can synch your meetings and other events, your tasks, and your contacts from your Exchange server. Exchange is a Microsoft product that hosts email, event/meeting information, tasks, contact info, etc. for individuals and companies. One normally sees Exchange servers in large companies, but one can also set up a personal Exchange “account” only for your personal use at various Exchange hosting services. Microsoft Outlook is the normal way you access all this information, but one can also access it via a web browser. The ability to get at this information via a phone, and have it sync with the server on a continual basis is what has made the Blackberry such a critical device for so many companies out there. RIM, the company that makes the Blackberry, is in talks with various device manufacturers, like PalmOne, to produce software for these devices. So we may yet see “Blackberries” which aren’t the actual “Blackberry” device, but something completely different like the Treo, just running Blackberry software. Until then, the other corporate solutions out there include Visto, Seven, and to a lesser extent Mailwave.

Chatter: this brings me to the final application and the one that really prompted this whole blog entry. Chatter actually was developed a while ago but was called IMChatter. It included some limited instant messaging capability, IMAP support and Push. However, like Mailwave, IMChatter sat between your mail server and your device and would do a lot of server work. Thus you couldn’t give it large mailboxes because that would tie up Chatter’s bandwidth. I believe you also had a monthly subscription fee as opposed to an upfront cost. You also had a get an account from the developer and this could take a while. I actually tried it out a month or so ago, but found that it made my Treo so sluggish as to be unusable. Support also seemed unreliable as messages on the discussion forum on the program’s website were not being answered. HOWEVER, Marc Blank, the developer of IMChatter, recently unveiled a new version of his application, renamed simply “Chatter.” This application is still in beta, but Marc seems very responsive to user input. There is now a forum on Treocentral specifically devoted to this development and Marc is a regular participant. The new version does not slow the Treo down and the interface is much nicer, and works better with the 5-way navigation buttons on the Treo. Messages synch perfectly and immediately and the push is true push. The notification screen when this happens only shows up if you aren’t in Chatter itself and goes away if you don’t do anything. You can also turn it off. The one thing that it doesn’t support is attachments, although according to Marc this is to be added as soon as early September! The price for Chatter, once it comes out, is also very low for such a complete solution at only $20. No recurring fees. This seems like the holy grail that some of us power (but budget) email users have been waiting for.

NPR had an interesting piece this morning on how income is related to obesity rates. Obesity historically was seen as a mark of wealth until fairly recently. It probably still is in some poorer areas. This was because only the wealthy had enough money to consume enough calories to become obese. This notion, of course, has been turned on its head recently because food is so plentiful.

Being overweight now doesn’t carry any specific class identity, but it is shifting more and more, and it may yet be associated mostly with those who are poor and/or uneducated. Although I do think that underserved segments of our society are not offered the choices that those of us who are fortunate are, I think it’s much more complex than simple dollars and sense.

First of all, there’s the cultural aspect to this. There is a mentality in this country to have immediate gratification. That gets mixed in with a sense of choice and a tradition of bounty that has yielded the famed “all-you-can-eat” restaurant. Despite healthfulness becoming a huge mantra of some camps within the society, I think it is still looked at derisively by many, especially the poor and uneducated. They have a hard enough time just getting by, why should they have to sacrifice on taste and fullness?

If one tries, one can eat in a healthy way on almost any budget. I think what really becomes the differentiating factor is not so much money but time, or convenience. It takes time to learn about what food is healthy for you, where to find it for the cheapest price, and then how to prepare it. And that is another big expenditure. You can get fresh produce that is not that expensive, but then you have to spend time actually making it. Compare this to just walking into a fast food restaurant and walking out a minute later with a “satisfying” meal and no wonder many people opt for the latter.

What I think is important to stress here is that everyone’s life and health is worth the added time AND expense for eating well. The French, I read once I can’t remember where, devote a significant percentage of their income to eating. To them it is one of life’s main pleasures. For the U.S. it is fuel, and the cheaper the better for a lot of people. Of course our rates of heart diseases and the like are significantly higher than the French and almost all other countries save perhaps India and some Scandinavian countries. Although this isn’t all due to food, it’s part of the equation. Julia Child, who died last week, introduced this country to French cuisine and the idea that food was something worth slaving over. Over the past 40 years or so we have seen the market for gourmet, specialty, and diet foods grow enormously, but we have also seen an equally impressive move towards fast/convenience food restaurants and highly processed food, be they easily recognized “junk” or highly processed foods that have been depleted of their fats, carbs, etc. masquerading as “health foods.” If we can provide choices to people that involve fresh, healthy foods (lean meats, fish, fresh veggies and fruit) and make these as palatable as the French can, then maybe even the extra cost of the ingredients and labor involved in making them on the spot will encourage everyone to choose them as opposed to the flash-frozen-then-nuked mass-production of the cheapest ingredients possible, which when doused in sugar and salt yield something titillating enough to our overstimulated taste buds that we would want to eat it.

You would think that having been blogging for over a year and using a Treo 600 and before that a Sidekick I would have caught onto moblogging already. Perhaps its because I don’t go on a whole lot of trips and when I do go on trips I often bring my laptop and can post blog entries.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “moblogging” is short for mobile blogging and involves posting blog entries, often with images, but not necessarily, from your mobile phone, which is much more portable than even a laptop. Then again, taking pictures on your digital camera, downloading them to the PC, then emailing them, especially if you normally take them in RAW format, can be a very time-consuming process that works against the whole idea of blogging while on travel.

While I’m sure people have been doing this for a few years now (that is sending images and blog entries from their phone), it really hasn’t caught on until this last 6-12 months due to camera’s on phones either not being very good, or not even existing! In fact, my Color Sidekick’s camera, even though it was much better than the old one on the Black and White Sidekick I had initially, still produced a pathetically bad picture. It was only when I obtained my Treo 600 a couple of months ago that I had at my disposal a camera that I could actually bear to look at its 640 x 480 images (0.3 megapixel). Even so, they are pretty darn small and poor quality compared even to my first 1.3 megapixel camera that I got back in 2000. Suffice it to say I can’t wait until then next version of the Treo comes out which rumor has it contains a real 1 megapixel camera. I would be happy with just a half a megapixel (or 800 x 600), but I’ll take a full MP, as long as it doesn’t seriously tax the processor. I’m just afraid that pushing up the resolution too much may require many more seconds to record an image, thus making it hard to take very many pictures in a given period of time, so you could miss out on a bunch of great shots. A secondary issue for some may be the text entry process. Most phones are horrible at this and it will take you forever just to write a sentence. More specialized devices with keyboards like the Treo, the Blackberry, and the Sidekick, have keyboards that allow for much easier typing, although still not as easy as a full-sized keyboard.

In any case, after getting my Treo and starting to explore the wide world of applications out there, I came across a category of blogging tools. I tried a couple out, but didn’t get all that far. The ones I tried out really only let you send plain text and maybe upload an image, but you couldn’t submit html which would allow you to create links. Of course, I’ve only played with a couple of these, so I still need to do a lot more searching. In the mean time, I heard about these moblog sites that are specifically set up for mobile blogging. I found probably a good half dozen of these sites and culled this number down to a couple that looked like they were nicely polished, slick, and had lots of features and which you didn’t have to pay for – or at least there was a free account option in addition to payed premium account options. Those two moblog sites are Buzznet and TextAmerica.

My idea was to pick one and take pictures on my recent trip to North Carolina and send the pictures. Of course, things were just too busy before the trip and during to figure out which site would work best, so I ended up just deciding to take a few pictures and then wait till I got back and had a bit of free time to explore these sites more. Now that I’m back, that’s just what I’m doing:

Buzznet – So far, Buzznet is free, but will supposedly be unveiling a paid service in the future which will affect what they offer for the free account. Their interface to me is a little more intuitive and it’s less JavaScript-intensive which just means that I might be able to access it via the web browser on my Treo as opposed to TextAmerica which might not work. Their user pages (where your photos show up) look a whole lot nicer than the default you get with (the free version of ) TextAmerica. The one problem I’ve had with Buzznet so far is that it seems to be slow, both when you go to their site, but more importantly in actually posting images. When I posted a test image to both sites via email, the one TextAmerica image came up immediately whereas I had to wait a couple of minutes for Buzznet to display it. Then I tried a couple more and nothing happened! Eventually – like 20 or 30 minutes later – I got replies from Buzznet with some error messages, but then when I checked the images were finally visible. Another downside is that Buzznet only allows you to post 10 images per day and 200 per month (for now), The other not so great thing about Buzznet is that there’s very little in the way of support. They have an FAQ and some help information on some of the screens, but this doesn’t amount to much. There are no support forums or a support page, or even an email for support. This is really important in my opinion and a company that doesn’t set up a support infrastructure to help their users and for their users to help each other is, I think, shooting itself in the foot. The one thing that makes Buzznet usable for me, though, is that they let you syndicate your content very easily. They provide feed files in a bunch of different formats and also provide a JavaScript tag that just lets you embed the content. Here, though, we again come to the weakness in not having adequate support info: apparently you can customize how your content is formatted where it’s being syndicated, but there’s no information on how to actually modify the feeds or the JavaScript. Nevertheless, the default is decent enough that I have added it to the right side of my blog here. If you don’t see it, scroll up or down a bit and you should see the last 5 images from my Buzznet moblog (I’ve only put two in so far as of this writing). You can click on these images to get a title and more detailed description. What I would like to customize is just to be able to include the title with the image here on the right…

TextAmerica – TextAmerica seems to have a lot of strengths where Buzznet is weak and visa versa. As mentioned, the initial image I posted came up immediately after it was sent. The main pages and the admin pages are very slick looking, but individual moblog pages seem very plain in comparison. For some, this may actually be preferable, but not for others. Unlike Buzznet, TextAmerica has extensive help information in their user guide. In addition to this they have an FAQ, and moblog hosted by their technical support person which includes updates on features and fixes as they are made. Finally, they actually have someone you can IM with questions to get immediate help (although when I looked this screen name was not logged in. The free service comes with 25MB of storage, enough for at least 500 small images, and a lot more if they are compressed enough. Unfortunately, going up one level to the paid service will jump you up to $7/month. This provides a bunch of additional features, twice the storage and additional bandwidth. The main thing that I wanted to do, though, has eluded me so far with TextAmerica. They say on their FAQ that there is code available that will let you syndicate your moblog, but they don’t provide it there and a search in their userguide also turned up nothing, so for now this pretty much eliminates TextAmerica as far as I’m concerned, but I am going to try to get in touch with them to see if I can get this code from them to syndicate here.

There’s something else that these sites offer for some people which is just as important as the functionality of posting your pictures – a community. People get to link to each other, label themselves as friends of another user, comment on their entries, etc. - genuinely picture-sharing sites. While definitely an interesting function, and very useful for some, it isn’t really something I want to use it for. I have a blog here at blog city and do all my writing here, so why have another just for photos? My inclination is to basically stick to one host for everything. I know people who have blogs, Livejournal journals, moblogs, and more where you can find their various kinds of content. To me, though, it’s a lot easier if I have a central place to go to for everything and I think easier for others as well. So why would I then go to another service for moblogging? Well, while Blog City, my blog host, does have SOME of the functionality of a moblog. I can email text entries from my phone and have the show up in my blog. I can also email an address at Blog City with an attached image and it will show up in my photo album. But unfortunately so far you cannot post an entry with both text and an image in it via an email with an attached photo and some text, which is what you would need to emulate the functionality of a moblog. I’ve contacted Blog City and as usual they were very receptive about the idea, but who knows how hard it is to implement and thus when (or if) it will. All I know is if it is offered then I can actually ditch the separate moblogs and use Blog City exclusively, which would be a whole lot simpler!

As you can tell, I am still really feeling my way through this whole phenomenon, and I may be missing a lot of things that some moblog veterans out there may be shaking their heads at. All I can say is – please correct me! Anything that I don’t have right, or that’s incomplete, please enlighten me (us) as to what the real deal is. If you have additional suggestions or corrections, I want to hear them!

Update: I finally got ahold of the TextAmerica support person via AIM and they said that syndication was only available on “upgraded” (read paid) accounts. Free accounts do not provide this, so I think it looks like Buzznet for now unless I come accross another moblog host that was previously unknown to me that provides even more for free…