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).

Happy New Year

Or as they say here, akemashite omedetou gozaimasu. I had intentions of designing a traditional nengajou (New Years greeting card) to send to folks but didn’t get my shit together, as per usual, so I put something up online. (If you follow the link, you’ll be able to see one of the 7-month late wedding photos Naoko and I had taken of us back in October and which I wrote briefly about here).