Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Live Blogging

If you are to believe the handset manufacturers and the telecom operators, blogging from your mobile device and not the PC will soon be the norm. So here I am sitting on a Shatabdi Express on my way back from Punjab trying to do exactly that. i'm cheating in one sense because I am using a Nokia E90 with a full keyboard instead of trying to type out a blog post using T9, which knowing the lengths of my posts is not something I would want to do. But that said, this is fun! i'm not the first person to blog this way and I believe many more people will join this bandwagon.
What am I doing in Punjab? Well, a story is the short answer, a rather fascinating one in fact. Why haven't i been posting more often? Well, i guess the not so long answer is that I simply haven't had the time. When I do have time, it is in situations like this. But i do have access to devices which make m-blogging, or so goes the term a lot easier. Is this the future of this medium? Don't think so as yet, but when next generation networks come along people will want content for their mobile phones, and I believe a lot of that content will come from other mobile phones.
By the way, Google might soon be launching a SMS based search function from mobile devices in India. I guess this is partly because there is so much confusion about spectrum and so much jostling. Mobile phones made the son of a (rich) panwallah into one of India's most admired businessmen, and everyone wants a piece of the pie and many people are willing to pay a huge sum for it. I believe it was because a certain nephew didn't like sharing with his uncle that he lost his job. Anyway, whatever happens I'm pretty sure I will be there delivering content from a variety of devices.

3 comments:

shyam said...

Ha! No way you are the first. Was surfing 'adult' content via GPRS while on a train somewhere in Rajasthan close to a year ago. You can't imagine the cultural confluence and the impact it has on the entire global village thing to be on the top berth in a second AC coach somewhere in Rajasthan and be watching lovely brazilian ladies trickle down at barely a couple of kilobits into your tiny screen. It is like earth shattering, at least on the Friedman scale.

J2ME blogging clients sucks balls the size of the whole planet. They are some of the most useless software ever made, be it Nokia's or anyone else's. Not too surprising considering that even desktop blogging clients are not that consistent or user friendly. That said, I have major fun using the twitter and facebook mobile-specific interfaces. Ideally, mobile blogging clients should not require connectivity as a must-have to function and should snync well and o well, pigs can fly too :-)

K said...

Mobile blogging clients suck f'sure and the oppurtunity is there for someone to develop a nice easy client that could say auto-transcribe audio and post that along with a pic in one or two easy steps. Typing on a mobile, even if you have a full keyboard is a bit of a bummer!
Won't happen for a while because VR software still has a way to go. By the way, Fernando or Kimi this Sunday?

Deepti Bose said...

I've been using the Nokia E61i for the last four months, before which I was using the Nokia E61. I haven't switched my laptop off since I bought the first one. I clear PDFs and playbacks on it, I surf the web on it, I read blog on it, and naturally, I also blog on it. Any blog posted after office hours, is through the mobile phone... how times have changed...