I was recently on a short trip to the west of China and it got me thinking about the technology of mobile blogging. For this trip, writing my blog entries was part of a developmental or pedagogical
exercise to help me make sense of my experience, further my understanding of Chinese culture, society and economy. In addition, it is a way of keeping family, friends and colleagues in the loop, to share the experience and let them know I’m safe. These I published on this site.

Blogging ‘at home’

When based around Ningbo or Nottingham or typically use Ecto to write and publish to the WordPress engine that powers the blog. On my mac, Ecto nicely pulls photographs from Aperture. In all, very similar to many people doing the same thing (though the blog engine, operating system, blog client and photo software might vary, the ease and integration is much the same).

Mobile blogging

On the road though I have my iPod Touch, my Nokia e60 (with wifi) and my camera. Alas none of them talk to each other. I can only get text from the iPod to the phone by email. The camera can’t talk to the other two. The camera doesn’t have a camera, hence the lack of photographs, though the process of descriptive writing does encourage the ethnographic imagination and also encourages contextual engagement (noting sounds and smells, for example).

To post my blog entries, I set up email submission on WordPress, the idea being I could write posts offline (such as now on the aeroplane) and email them when I next have wifi access. Unfortunately, despite a successful test, it didn’t work in the field–the body of the post being stripped mostly or so many carriage returns being added to it that significant editing was required.

My best solution is to write the posts offline on my phone and the copy and paste them into the WordPress web front end. Final checking
and editing (mostly for pagnation) is done on the iPod. This was working well enough until my mobile phone died.

When it was working, it was (frustratingly) functional at best. For example, the Nokia web browser is not great and regularly quits. I can’t write ofline on the iPod (with much better web browser) because it lacks copy and paste.

Toward an ideal solution

What would seem to be needed is an offline blog client for either the Nokia or the iPod. I think that such a thing exists for the top of the range Nokia, but £500 seems a bit rich for a solution (though, by mobile phone standards, it does have a fantastic camera). An alternative is in beta testing and I will try to investigate that.

The ideal solution would be offline blogging software on the iPod or an iPhone, the latter benefiting from wireless access and a camera that as some way to share the photographs with the blog authoring software (eg., same memory card, Bluetooth or wifi sharing).

Applications

I can see such a solution being of use to students on exchange or field trips to keep their field-diaries. Similarly, those of us attempting research either ethnographic or deploying other qualitative resarch methods informed by ethnographic principles could use such a combination of hardware and software for a research log. Out of the academy, the emerging area for such technology is in citizen-journalism, where the possibility for a new democratic reportage is emerging. Within more traditional roles, aid workers, traveling sales representatives, employees and others working away from colleagues could using blogging tools to keep ‘home’ informed of activities.

It should be remembered that the technology of the internet does not have to be deployed in the public domain–students’ field diaries could be made accessable only to module leaders and/or other course members.

Aid workers, traveling sales representatives and others might have their reports viewable only by line managers. In these examples, the activity is only blogging in the sense that blogging tools are used; in every other sense the activity is more like traditional activity reporting for lone managers.

Next steps

It is only a little over a month until the Apple World Wide Developers’ Conference. We will see then the new iPhone and iPod OS, with developer applications enabled. Hopefully, some blogging clients will also be announced.

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Posted via email, written offline on my iPod, in several locations.
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