Russell Beattie

Yesterday's Talk of the Nation focused on Blogging. Rock on! And believe it or not, the first question after the break via email (sent from a cellphone) was about "mobile blogs". Nice.

Of course, Lev Grossman, the guy from Time got it amazingly wrong... heheh:

Well... mobile blogs, are uh... not fundamentally different from other kinds of blogs, but you can access them from on portable devices like cellphones and blackberries and things like that. I mean they feed in almost scarily toward the addictive quality of blogs. They're addictive to write and also addictive to read. I find myself [with] certain blogs coming back to them you know, once an hour, reloading the page to see if there's anything new there. And, uh, I think mobile blogs just take that a little bit of a step further. You're walking down the street and "hmm" I wonder if you know, Blogger X has put something else up. You don't have to get back to your desk to find out, you can just give it a whack on your cell phone and you'll know.

I mean, okay. You gotta give the guy some slack. He's live on the radio as the "blogging expert" and he's given a question he has no idea about, so he wings it. LOL. I would've done much worse.

This is of course not "mobile blogging" which is centered around multimedia (photos and video) and location, but mobile news aggregation. It'd be nice if more moblogs were as accessible via mobile phones as via normal web clients, but as it is now, most moblogging services (and regular weblogging services that add a post-via-email service on as an afterthought and call it moblogs) are not accessible via most wap browsers. Unless you have a more advanced cellphone that can approximate regular HTML, most moblogs out there are what I call "post and forget" services, where you have to get to a PC to figure out exactly what photo was posted and what it looks like. Heaven help you if you post the wrong picture to TextAmerica and don't have a PC handy.

This blog, by the way, isn't XHTML, but does have a Handset CSS stylesheet which tells Mobile Opera not to load any of the images, and reformats some of the content in a more handset-friendly manner. There are still KB size issues, as the site's pages are particularly heavy to download OTA, but at least they're more readable on your phone.

This stuff is becoming more common, and services will support this stuff natively soon. Nice of this guy to give it some pre-publicity. :-)

-Russ