Loading ...Moblogs
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…