It finally happened!

For the last couple of years the web has been presenting a growing amount of free moblog services. These moblogs in turn have presented a growing amount of mobloggers- using the services for free.. (remember - free moblog services!)

And now - the biggest moblog service of them all - the American moblog community textamerica, finally did it. They charge new users 99 dollars a year.

It was bound to happen. The question is - what will happen now? Will people pay? Will users drop out? Will the community revolt, as happened when Yahoo demanded Yahoo memberships for Flickr users?

Well.. We will see.. But let me guess - I guess that the community at textamerica is strong enough to keep their users, and that the users who are active within the community are willing to pay- because they will (rightly) think it is worth it.

Some users might drop out, but it will be those who were not really into it anyway.
Recruiting will be harder. At least as long as there are free alternatives around. And there are plenty of them out there.

Category: moblogging

Event moblog

Every fourth year, the students at the University of Lund hosts a carneval... and this year was Carneval year!

The media coverage of this event was slightly different this year. Four years ago there where hardly any mobilephones around, and not many sent pictures from their phones.

This year, many have cameraphones, and everybody at the carneval were invited to send their mobilepictures as MMS to a moblog hosted by the local newspaper. This way, an event- moblog was born, showing pictures from the carneval as it happened, with the carnevalists as mobloggers.
The moblog can be seen here, and is now closed for incoming messages. (the carneval is over)

The crew behind mobilblogg.net made it happen, based on knowledge and technology used at mobilblogg.net.

The moblog was up and running from tuesday to monday, and was a bit slow to start with, but filled up with pictures and comments as the weekend approached.

It worked by letting people send MMSes to a (easy-to-remember) mailadress, and pictures was published instantly, without preview from the editors. (however, there was moderation, and viewers could report misbehaviour). Pictures was also open for the public to comment on, without pre-moderation. All in all, it was almost too open for me to be comfortable.

Some decisions had to be made along the way regarding how open or closed it should be -should we let people moblog to mailadress or a phone number?, allow anonymous comments or not? preview and publish all pictures manually or use unmoderated publishing? etc etc. All in all, we let openess and participation rule over control and moderation as long as we could. And it worked.

The only restriction we made was that the moblog was closed at night, when the editors were sleeping. Pictures sent after midninght was first published the next day.

Our customer, the newspaper, was very pleased with the moblog, and new projects are already underway :-)

If you would like to know more, send me an email and I will be more than happy to answer your questions.


Category: moblogging
Category: eventblog

Researching moblogging

Karin Wagner, a swedish Doctor of Arts and Science will over a three year period study one English (moblog.co.uk?) one Danish, one Dutch and one Swedish (yep, mobilblogg.nu) moblog.

There is an article in GP - a morning paper from Gothenburg, about it, interviewing Karin.

They also bring up the similarities between moblogging and Lomogaphy.

I wonder where they got that idea?, maybe from here?

The article is good, answering the "who moblogs, and what" questions... the why is left out. I hope they will answer the "Why do people moblog" question when the study is being published.

We'll just have to wait a few years...

Category: moblogging

Commercial moblogging

Sorry for the lack of updates. We just recently got our first major commercial project (or actually two) creating moblogsolutions for one of the major Swedish newspapers.

So I'm busy with that for a while now.
Category: moblogging