protocol 7

Moblogging

Several weeks ago a woman from an alternative newspaper Columbus Alive contacted me about the RNC Mobnet and moblogging in general. Here is the article as it ran (yesterday, I think).

Phoning it in

Armed with camera phones, mobloggers are adding a visual twist to online journals

by Erin Donnelly

No, it’s not a correspondence system for gangsters sharing money-laundering advice. Moblogs are online journals that include camera phone pictures posted directly from users’ phones. It’s an updated version of blogging—the popular journals that allow readers to respond with comments—with a visual twist.

Moblogs (mo = mobile, as in mobile phone, blog = web log) started just a few years ago with the advent of camera phones and, although they haven’t taken the world by storm quite yet, they’re definitely getting there. Last summer there was even an international moblogging conference in Tokyo.

As with text-based blogging, part of the appeal of moblogging is the relative ease with which novices can get started. Websites like textamerica.com, buzznet.com and moblog.co.uk give each registered user a free e-mail address; the user can then instantly post pictures from his or her cell phone by e-mailing them to the address. Most sites allow the user to attach captions, and then anyone who visits the site can view and respond to the photos.

Walker Evans, creator of the nightlife resource columbusunderground.com, launched a Columbus moblog last year at cu.textamerica.com. Evans decided to start the moblog after he upgraded to a new cell phone with a camera and saw the possibilities of other moblogs on the Internet.

“I think moblogs are still in the early stages of what they’ll eventually be capable of doing,” Evans said, “so I figured that jumping on board early will help me to get a head start on things to come.”

Even for those accustomed to the convenience of digital photography, moblogging is a more direct option. “It’s always much faster and easier to snap a picture with my cell phone and upload it to the blog within a few seconds,” Evans said. “Plus, I don’t always carry my digital camera with me, but my cell phone is always nearby.”

Cell phone companies have been getting in on the trend, with companies like Ericsson, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless offering online photo albums to their customers.

Nikki Learakos, Verizon Wireless Get-It-Now product manager, says Verizon’s photo album feature has been growing in popularity. Users can invite friends and family to view the photos online, expanding the way their cell phones help them keep in touch.

While personal uses like this are a convenient extension of digital photography, moblogging also holds promise as a sort of guerilla news medium, much like blogging has become a popular source of unfiltered (and instant) commentary on breaking events.

With just a few clicks, mobloggers can post photos instantly and spontaneously, to be viewed all over the world. Imagine the consequences of moblogs during protests or riots—no filtering of which images are shown and no waiting for tomorrow’s newspaper, or even next hour’s website update. Viewers can watch the event as it happens, covered from the perspective of average citizens who are there.

In fact, a moblog was set up just for the protests during last summer’s Republican National Convention. According to the RNC Mobile Network site, rnc.freespeech.org, the network was “an attempt to utilize the ubiquitous nature of the mobile network that will emerge when many thousands of people come together to collectively demonstrate at the RNC. It is also an attempt to mobilize more people to make media and participate in covering events that the mainstream media wouldn’t touch with an extremely long pole.”

“It’s a fusion of the omnipresent cell phone network and an Indymedia-esque collective and alternative reporting style,” explained Andrea Mignolo, computer information systems co-director of Free Speech TV.

The RNC Mobile Network site listed an e-mail address for people to send pictures and videos of protests, and assured only a five-minute delay in posting the images. The site also featured a map of the area around the Republican convention where most of the protests took place, so visitors could see what was happening and where it was happening.

“The RNC mobnet was an experiment in event-specific collective moblogging,” said Mignolo, noting that about 30 people ended up posting to the site. “From the beginning the project was an experiment without expectations; you cannot tell people how to use a given technology, but instead introduce them to it and see how they interpret its use.”

Mignolo said she thinks moblogs have the potential to become powerful alternative reporting tools and much more dynamic than traditional news media.

Evans said it’s common for blogs to beat traditional media to the punch on breaking stories.

“I think moblogs will accompany [traditional media] as they continue to grow in popularity,” he said. “This type of guerrilla journalism may not always be as trustworthy and accurate as big-business media, but it will definitely continue to be faster on breaking news.”

The moblog yafro.com has a special section called “Pictures from the Frontline,” where soldiers can post photos from overseas offering an unfiltered view of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, a few dozen unique moblogs have been set up by soldiers. Like most moblogs, visitors can post comments and, although the majority are supportive of the troops—like “Keep up the good work”—a couple have sparked some interesting political debates.

Don’t expect to see any graphic, heat-of-battle pics at Yafro. Most photos are taken between combat missions and offer an inside look at the downtime of soldiers’ daily lives. Still, it may be one of the best uses (so far) of the young medium—making the leap from the online personal journal to being a source of war correspondence.