Moblogging

I’ve been getting excited about various endeavours from Joi Ito and others in the “moblog” arena, that is blogging from mobile devices like cellphones. Joi and others put together a special New Year’s Eve moblog event which demonstrates some of the real-time capabilities of mobile blogging (and some of the inevitable problems as well that come from early-adopting).

I don’t have a camera-equipped cellphone, but I have found myself longing to publish entries to this blog from my phone via email for quite a while now, so I’ve been following recent happenings in the area. I actually use my cellphone primarily as a email device, and have built up quite a dexterous thumb in the process of typing out emails on the phone keypad that I might actually be part of what young Japanese call the oyayubizoku. (In point of fact, in the 7 months I’ve had the phone, I’ve probably made less than 20 phone calls on it. I hate talking on the phone, generally, and anyway, emailing costs only about 1 yen per email (less than a US penny)).

Joi has released a mail2entry script for coverting email to Movable Type entries, which looks simple enough but unfortunately is still a tad more complicated than I have the time for, but I’ve got to think a more end-user-friendly app (or explanation of Joi’s script) is around the corner (blogging tools Radio and Blogger already have this capability built in to their products).