Author: Mobile Kurt

A woman sits next to me on a crowded commuter train, reading a thick book in English. She’s Japanese, in her 50’s, and naturally my curiosity is piqued. What book I don’t know, but I see names like Goethe, and Germany. On the surface it must be history, or biograpy. But it reads like fiction. At any rate, I want to talk to her, find out the title, and why she’s reading it. But I don’t of course, the moment I do 10 pairs of eyes would shoot our way, bringing embarrassment. But I’m not worried about my embarrassment, but her’s. This is Japan, where people read their books on trains covered by some anonymous paper (usually provided by bookstores), giving them some “cover” of privacy. Of course it’s entirely possible she was actually letting me see the inside of her book on purpose, but we’ll never know, will we?

Posted via cellphone.

If this works, then I owe Kevin of Bastish.net a beer, or two….will post more via the desktop (again, if this works).

FROM THE DESKTOP: Well, lo and behold, it worked! I should perhaps first off explain that what I just did there was post to this site via my cellphone, by sending an email from my phone’s email client. This is what they call “moblogging”, and something I’ve been pining for ever since I started to see Joi Ito start to do this late last year.

As mentioned above, credit for being able to do this goes to Kevin and his Moblog for Other People widget, not to mention his server which is receiving the email and then passing on my text (and later images) to this site. Kevin rightly realized that non-techie folks like myself would find the various scripts out there a bit beyond the pale of understanding and know-how, or as I discovered in earlier forays into this technology, not something one’s web hosts might readily setup. (I should also here send out a special mention to Dav, who set up Mie’s Tokyo Tidbits and very generously offered to do something similar for me to what Kevin ended up doing, though at the time I wasn’t sufficiently interested to bother him with it).

Now, I have moblogged before, using wapblogger and my cellphones web browser, but it was more cumbersome than I wanted. I’m still not too much further along in answering the question I’ve asked before, which is why exactly I need this capability, especially at the moment when all I can post is text. My musings are hardly of the variety that they need to be instantaneously sent to that part of the world that is reading this site, but then again, there are lots of small and perhaps inconsequential thoughts and observations that I do have that never see the light of day because I don’t notate them down.

Others who are now moblogging thanks to Kevin’s generosity include Japan-based blogs Based on a True Story, Domo Domo, and Tokyo Boy.