Coping With a 'Moblogging' Future
Strictly speaking, the word moblog is not a new contribution to the Seussian vocabulary of the Internet. But the term—a portmanteau word of mobile and blog—still hasn't widely caught on outside the digerati crowd, years after cellular companies developed the technology to upload images and video taken by a camera phone directly to the Web, cutting out the computer as a middleman and allowing people to maintain a blog from their mobile phone.
The problem, industry analysts and executives seem to agree, has a lot to do with the fact that Americans don't know how to use their phones. Uploading the photos taken on a phone directly to a personal photo page on the Internet, such as Flickr or Facebook, requires the user to figure out how to download an application onto his phone, locate that application among the thicket of menus, and get the settings straightened out. Additional charges may apply.
But a series of partnerships between cellular carriers and mobile-to-Web clients is designed to make that process a lot simpler, and those who are behind it imagine a future in which almost anyone with a phone can snap a photo or shoot a video, click a button, and send it to the Internet for all the world to see. Because companies charge users for data transfer, either at a flat rate or by the byte, depending on the plan, this could spell big profits.
In early January 2007, the blogging company Six Apart, which administers TypePad and other popular blogging platforms, signed a deal with Nokia to include its software preinstalled on certain new Nokia phones. And two weeks ago, ShoZu, a mobile media company whose technology is already used by sites like Facebook, signed a similar deal with Samsung for its new camera phone. Their hope, officials say, is to open up the idea of blogging to an audience that doesn't necessarily want to compose a manifesto.
"Many people don't feel comfortable with a big text box. There's a performance-anxiety aspect of blogging," says Andrew Anker, an executive vice president at Six Apart who has been moblogging for several years. "Mobile blogging, in many ways, frees you up. Because of the nature of the input device, you can't really write that much. I find that liberating."
The ramifications of an army of amateur paparazzi are endless, though that prospect is still in the future. As ShoZu senior marketing director Jennifer Grenz notes, the concept of using a cellphone as a reporting tool is foreign to most users, particularly in North America.
"They don't necessarily understand the capabilities of their phones," Grenz says. "That's going to take a bit."
In the meantime, Grenz says she uses her phone for one peculiar activity that may be a window into the paranormal future of moblogging: Using her phone, she can directly upload a photo to a digital picture frame on her parents' mantel, allowing them an ever changing image of her travels.
Grenz describes moblogging as "near real time," meaning that the delay between when a photo or video is recorded and when it appears on YouTube is fairly short, so long as the phone's reception is good enough. But the phenomenon is unlikely to stop there.
"What they're looking at is not just phones but all kinds of consumer devices that have a network connection, like digital cameras and camcorders," says Charles Golvin, an analyst with the technology strategies firm Forrester Research. The goal, he says, is to eventually create streaming real-time connections, so that anyone with a networked camcorder could start broadcasting live on location.
It's too early to say exactly how this eventuality will sculpt the tenor of public life, though the analysts and marketers inevitably mention former Virginia Sen. George Allen's famous "macaca moment"—a faux slur caught on camera by the opposition and posted on YouTube—as the kind of thing that could get a lot more common. But Grenz, for one, was quick to point out that politics will not be the first thing people decide to moblog about; for every one amateur video of a senator, there will be a hundred of Lindsay Lohan.
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