Mobile blogging isn't going to be about text. Instead, it’s going to be about photos and video that you upload semi-automatically from your phone as you take them, with the bare minimum of words required. Of course, you might go in later and write some proper captions from your PC, but for the most part, moblogging will be visual. Which answers those questions about why anyone would blog from their phone.
That was certainly the message on the Motorola stand, where the company was showing off its mobile blogging application which basically makes it quick and easy to post pics and videos to a range of online file-sharing services. It’s nothing that the ShoZu application doesn’t do already, but since it’ll be on Motorola handsets out of the box, it’ll find a wide audience.
“You can do everything that we’re showing you already, but it’ll take seven to nine steps,” said Motorola’s product manager (ahem, name to come later). “No consumer’s going to do that. We’re developing these applications to do it in one or two clicks, and working with some of these online communities to preconfigure the handsets, so consumers have a couple of options for photo, video and audio blogging out of the box.”
Apparently contracts are still at the signing stages, so Motorola isn’t saying which sites it’s working with – but the fact that the company was demoing Flickr on the stand indicates that may be one of them. You’ll also be able to enter settings for unsupported sites so your Moto phone can post to them too.
The application will start appearing in Motorola handsets throughout the course of this year. At the moment, it sends photos and video via MMS, which for video isn’t great in terms of size and quality. Will this change to using a phone’s regular data connection at some point? Thankfully, yes.
“Some online community sites are developing http APIs, so as they start doing that, we’ll also start supporting it,” she said. “With MMS, 300KB isn’t enough to send much video! So we see the video sites and maybe the photo sites that do printing will go for that, while others may be happy with MMS. We’ll support all of it.”
The fact that Motorola’s application supports various sites makes it interesting – and more flexible than, say, Nokia’s strategy of preloading individual apps for, say, Flickr and Vox on its handsets. Let’s see if it sparks an upsurge in mobile blogging as and when it makes it into Moto’s phones later this year.