Daniel’s been taking a look at mobile blogging — that is, blogging via your handset — and found nearly every offering to be substandard or in many cases, non existing. Most services rely on you using an email gateway — i.e. you email from your Blackberry or handset, that email is then converted into a blog post. I used this regularly when I was with Typepad.
What I really want is a symbian native wordpress client. Then I’ll be happy. Or a Blackberry wordpress client. Or a WINDOWS wordpress client. ANYTHING. I tried offering paying people to make some software for me but alas, no one wanted to know.
You can of course easily microblog with Twitter, Jaiku and the rest… Gahhh.
What’s your experience of mobile blogging?
Link: Dan’s Blog (2.0) » The State of Mobile Blogging: It Ain’t Pretty
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.
As of yesterday 14th Jan 2008 there is now a Symbian WordPress application, download and try from http://www.telewaving.com/products_2.html
Alternatively have you tried Shozu application (www.shozu.com) they now do WordPress.
Personally I use the built in Nokia Share Online for mobile blogging with VOX, works great for me and you can add up to 6 images or video.
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.
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 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.
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.
Moveable Type has a native iPhone interface that is pretty good.
http://plugins.movabletype.org/imt/
Could still do with some further improvements, but I can’t complain so far.
Guys why don’t you give trutap’s mobile blogging a spin and let us know what you think! We support Blogger, Typepad, Xanga and more. You can even upload a pic at the same time m.trutap.com
[…] Ewans Post at SMS Text News on mobile blogging (As a comment on Dan’s post), I agree that moblogging can be a pain in the […]
As per Gerrymoth:
I managed to blog the entire Glastonbury Festival straight to my VOX through the Share Online application on my N95.
http://whatleydude.vox.com
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
@Hans: This looks cool, but have 2 concerns… I don’t nesc want blog readers to know my mobile number – could there be an alias option? Also, there’s no RSS feed.
Hi Ben,
Good comments. We might implement alias and RSS feed in the service.
Thanks!
Regards,
Hans