Moblogging Ascendant

What about blogging from a mobile device, called moblogging? At first blush, this sounds ideal -- you're in the middle of Yellowstone Park, or at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and you dash off a quick blog entry from your phone, the ultimate convenience in sharing your thoughts with the world. But once you start thinking about it, doesn't it seem excessively painful to enter text using a numeric keypad for input? I know that millions of teenagers send gazillions of characters of SMS text to each other using only a numeric keypad, but comparing text messaging to blog entries is not really fair. SMS messages are short by necessity, and the people that use them have developed a fairly elaborate shorthand which speeds up input. Blog entries, on the other hand, tend to be real prose, with real sentences and in many cases multiple paragraphs per blog entry.

If textual blogging has a future on mobile devices, it will most likely succeed on devices that have more sophisticated input mechanisms than a numeric keypad alone. Palm OS devices, for example, have a stylus that makes it significantly easier to enter text. Other devices, like the RIM BlackBerry and the Sharp Zaurus, include a small QWERTY keyboard.

Even if your MIDP phone isn't well suited to capturing your prose, it may have a camera, and here I believe blogging and mobile devices can combine with great success. It would be extremely convenient to be able to take pictures using your mobile phone, then upload them directly to your blog. You could add text later when you get to a computer with a keyboard.