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tech news The Three M's of Moblogs: Mobile Phone Blogging, Real-time Mobility and Mob Media
Whether they serve as personal travelogues, political weapons or media outlets on the go, moblogs take the amateur journalism of weblogs into the field.The origin of moblogging---the transmission of information from a portable source, such as a mobile phone, to a weblog---reads like an Internet urban legend. The story goes that audience members at a February 2002 PC Forum conference started spreading messages through their Wi-Fi enhanced laptops during a speech by Joe Nacchio, the CEO of US telecommunications company Qwest. Nacchio, who reportedly complained about company difficulties, was heckled offstage as the audience quickly learned of his immense stock sales and profit via the notes being passed around. That day, the immediate dissemination of mobile communication formed a live blog that practically lynched a CEO. Today, moblogging is much more than an urban legend. Involving only a laptop and a wireless card, mobile blogging offers the potential for hybrid forms of media that can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Now, multimedia news can travel faster as users call up information and text images from the street using personal cell phones. What results, is a three-way conference call between wireless technology, real-time mobility, and mobdriven media. Mobile Phone Blogging: Look Ma, It's Magic! Accessing the Internet from a mobile phone may seem futuristic, but recent technologies such as SMS instant phone messenger and text image advancement allow phones and computers to connect in new ways. Programs such as mblog and hiptop transfer data coming in from mobile phones to readable and even searchable weblog links.
According to Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, moblogs allow information to enter the online sphere from "free floating wireless data cloud." Mobile phones by their nature, he says, are free because they are not connected to anything immovable. Rheingold says that the mingling of actual and virtual spaces will allow individuals to fuse and share their own physical and geographical realities and behaviors. In his book, Rheingold says he refers to the rise of this new type of subjective media as "the birth of peer-to-peer journalism." Moblog Mobility: Person-to-person Connections The mobility that moblogs allow their users is essential in creating free floating travllogs and weblogs. In his November 21, 2002 The Feature article, Justin Hall suggested that the mob could be taken out of the moblog to create intimate travelogues and goings-on-about-town diaries. Hall calls this type of communication, in which friends would contact friends, a "personal appli." The personal appli is likely to appeal to those closest to users -- those who just want to know where a person is and what they are doing. Who needs a postcard anymore when the intimacy of moblogs can replace snail-mail, with a user transmitting a message to friends from abroad, straight from the steps of the Parthenon or any other far-flung destination? How many times have you met a new person only to realize that you'd love to introduce them to someone else you know? When you are at a party, wouldn't a moblog come in handy to distribute information between people you are meeting to other contacts who may not by physically present? "Add in some location information, links to people you know and people near you," Hall said, "and now mobile weblogs have morphed into a combination of weblog, instant messenger, and business card," Hall added. "These small messages about a person's state might not seem worthy of the nightly news," Hall added, "but they would be important for a small group of friends and family." Mob Media: Peer-to-Peer Journalism When his book was published in October 2002, Rheingold predicted that people would start reporting the news from mobile phones. "Sometime after that," he said in an e-mail interview, "people started coming up with software hacks for sending content directly to blogs." Since then, mobile phone blogs have offered immediate local news coverage. "In recent anti-war demonstrations, activists began sending still photos and live video directly to the Internet," Rheingold said. "In all previous demonstrations, police could cover up brutality by seizing cameras and destroying film. They can't do that if the images are sent directly to the Net." According to Joseph Lasica, editor and writer of the Online Journalism Review, more and more people will "jump into the amateur journalism game," as text messaging "seriously takes off."
Text messaging "will really be something" said Lasica, "when built-in cameras and camcorders become pervasive." As bloggers broadcast real time visuals, the importance of immediacy and capturing the news as it happens comes into the foreground. "Text is cool," said Lasica, "but pictures bring immediacy and a richness of detail that no words can." The Future of Moblogs: Is it bright? While moblogs such as Joi Ito's, found on his weblog from Japan, offers the intimacy and immediacy of reporting text images that he sees, takes, and likes, moblogging is still in its infancy. Lasica calls the genre a "niche of a niche." He said, "That may not be sexy, but the fact remains that only one or two percent of the half million bloggers out there will be using mobile access." The reason is simple, "The mobile phone will always be a communication tool rather than a publishing device," said Lasica. However, author Howard Rheingold welcomes "the blossoming of hundreds of thousands of blogs" as a counter-movement to corporate controlled media networks. "Blogs are not as powerful as the mass media --yet," he said, "but I expect many-to-many media to bloom as mobile devices enable many people to report what is happening on the street." RELATED LINKS Foneblog - A Website for Every Mobile Phone - Newbay's article on Phoneblog software. SMS blog: Wherever I am, you?ll know. - SMS blog site. NYC Building Free WiFi - Techdirt article on free Wi-Fi in NYC. Smart Mobs - Howard Rheingold's Smart Blog Weblog. Lisa Le Fevre is a graduate student at New York University. She was a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times during 9/11 and has written for The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. |
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| Recent comments by Bill Gates have stirred up a small backlash among copyright reformists |
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 08.21.2004 - 4:06 pm EDT"Roshan shares a personal anecdote about P2P software"
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