Mobile blogging has become increasingly popular as more and more people become unplugged from their desks and hit the road with their preferred mobile devices – camera phones, wireless PDAs, Starbucks-bound laptops, iPODs, and so on.  As Dave said recently in a posting on Scripting.com,

[Mobile Blogging] is any activity that occurs away from your normal blog-writing place whose purpose is to create content for your blog.

(In this session we're interested in "mobile blogging" and wish to sidestep debates around the use of some other term that attracts contentiousness – we’re not interested in regurgitating that debate here. Let's assume you've got  a home base and that anytime you post to your blog from anwhere (and with any device) but your home computer you are mobile blogging.)

Defined this way, I bet you are already mobile blogging in your daily life today. The challenge is in figuring out how mobile blogging can be made easier to do. What do we need to make mobile blogging easier, less a chore, more a part of our daily blogging life?

Cell phone manufacturers are increasing the resolution of their camera phones, but most still offer no easy way to synch with and transfer the photos either via email or wireless transfer to a host computer. And in many locales the infrastructure needed to support mobile blogging isn't there - too many people have to spend too much extra money to try to upstream their entries only to have the carrier drop the line.  What do we realy need to put the mobile in mobile?

What formats do we need, beyond GIFF, JPEG, QuickTime and MP3/4?  Do we need to work with anything else?

What gadgets and software can Apple, Microsoft or Sun build to make it easier to blog with text, images, and audio and even video, and to synch our mobile work with our desktops, servers, or remotely hosted blogs without requiring rocket science?

And speaking of audio blogging - try audio blogging today while driving your car 75 mph down an interstate and see if you don’t end up wrapped around a tree?  Clearly there is room for improvement there.

As Dave says, “In the future I will be mobile blogging when I hit the big red Record button on my iPod and talk into it for a half-hour while driving across the wheat fields of Alberta and then hit the big red button again to pause the recording and save it to the internal disk of the iPod. (A low battery also causes it to be saved.) I will be mobile blogging when I don't drive off the road into one of the wheat fields.”

Come to this session prepared to discuss these and any other topic that will help us to move mobile blogging forward (park your semantic battles outside the room, please).  In the end all blogging will be mobile blogging, so we if do our jobs right we won’t need to be talking about mobile blogging as something separate from “regular” blogging a few year down the road.

# Posted by Craig Cline on 9/23/04; 10:21:56 PM - --