One of the things I could never really wrap my head around was the complete and total failure of moblogging as a platform and as idea. Moblogs had a (very) short renaissance period in 2003 when camera phones made their mainstream debut (yes, it was only 6 years ago) and carriers were heavily pushing MMS. There were a few problems back then – MMS to email was extremely expensive and users were heavily restricted by the types of content they could upload – moblogs never really caught on in the way blogging did – even though they probably should have.
The rules of the game are slightly different today. Data is cheap(er), most mobile phones can send emails without the use of MMS and 3rd-party software to upload photos and videos are a dime a dozen. The “moblog crowd”, however, has moved on, and mobile bloggers have long been posting to Twitter from their mobiles as a means of getting their content published on the go. Twitter is excellent for getting mobile content pushed immediately to the masses – especially with Twitpic and Qik added to the mix. But the question remains – how can the model of the standard moblog evolve into a truly useful (and flexible) mobile blogging platform, especially when we share different types of mobile content on different platforms and networks?
I revisited Tumblr today, and realized that, if set up correctly, it could be a wonderful tool for creating a mobile timeline blog, aggregating my published mobile content from throughout the day. Tumblr is a blogging platform for Tumblogs, which wikipedia describes as:
One of the great things about Tumblr specifically, is that is allows one to set up the service to pull posts from other services via RSS. This is great – because it means that you don’t have to change much of your current behavior in order to set up a moblog with Tumblr. I post articles to Delicious bookmarks on my mobile via Viigo and upload photos to Flickr from my mobile via the Flickr Uploader for Blackberry. All that’s left, really, is to pull all of these together and mash them up.
Hippocamp Software provide a great (and free) Blackberry client for Tumblr, which allows you to post text, links and images to your Tumblog directly from your Blackberry. You don’t have to do this though – if you’re using the Flickr Uploader for Blackberry (or Shozu for most mobile phones, or Nokia Share Online), you can assign a special tag to your uploaded Flickr/Picasa photos (I chose “mobileupload”) and instruct Tumblr to automatically “pull” these tagged photos into your Tumblog, where they will be ordered by date taken. If you use Viigo (Blackberry / Windows mobile), you can easily post articles from your favorite websites to your Delicious bookmarks. If you give these links a special tag (like “mobilelink”), Tumblr can fetch these, too. If video is your thing, Tumblr can fetch your Qik videos, too.
The result is a timeline of links, text snippets and photos you’ve posted throughout the day on your mobile phone. It may not be as immediate as Twitter – but that’s not the point. The point is to document a timeline of you outside, out and about on your mobile. It’s incredibly easy, requires minimal setup, and if you’re posting links, videos and photos via your mobile anyway – this method brings everything together into a streamlined format for your friends and family to enjoy.
I use ping.fm to post to pretty much everything. I did set up an email address that will post direct to my Wordpress install, but I’ve never really made use of it.
I tried tumblr for that a while back, but never really got into it. That was before cheap data and many mobile apps though, so I might try again. Also consider posterous (postero.us), where you can blog by mail. It intelligently handles attachments, so all you need is a mail app on your mobile.
@moeffju
Except that Google Mail for Blackberry doesn’t handle attachments…
have you taken a look at soup.io btw?
@shay – I did back when it was just a life stream service, looks like they’ve evolved quite a bit since then!
Their lifestream is still their best functionality, but they’ve become virtually identical to tumblr in other repsects.
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