Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Joi Ito's Web -> responding to Russell's thoughts on moblogging. Russell Beattie I think unless you're a student who's always out and about or a mover and shaker like Joi there's not a whole hell of a lot to moblogging. It's more of an instant online scrapbook than a real communications medium. With blogging there's that level of interactivity which makes it very interesting. I read blogs, I copy permalinks, I write my posts and post links, and I check my referrers for people who linked to me. With moblogging, I take a picture, send off an email and then I'm done. There's nothing else to do - no interaction. Photos don't link. And browsing the web from a 2" x 3" screen is difficult at best. [..] However there's a kernal of an idea there. I don't think it's the equivalent of weblogging, so maybe moblogging isn't the right name for it. But that power of instant communication from your always-on connected wireless device is incredible. Truly "smart mob" stuff. There's going to be a killer app for these devices soon along these lines, we just need to find what it is. I have my doubts whether moblogging - as a mobile version of weblogging - is it. I guess I would disagree a bit. Moblogging is still in its infancy. (Although Steve Mann has been doing stuff with mobile camera on the web for a long time...) I think the cameras and the other attributes of the device will get better. Imagine the Sidekick with a built in camera and a color screen. The new Sharp phone has a full VGA color screen! Foma mobile video phones do 384K. So, the dinky sreen, gritty image, thing will be fixed soon. Although the conversation style of moblogging will probably be different than weblogging, I think you have other ways to thread things. For example, if you leave messages and images in locations for people. For instance, if you go to a restaurant, you can push a button and it pulls up all of the interesting things people have written while they were there and threads you to other places those people have been. If you're going to a place, you search for people who have moblogged from that location, finding links to their images and maybe their weblogs. In an "augmented reality" (see my brother-in-law Scott Fisher's work on this. He's actually done a system of using mobile phones to annotate space with content.) sort of way, it's like annotating the real world. That's how I look at it. I'm this little thing crawling around the earth, annotating it with images, sounds and text. You leverage being mobile by being able to add location. This database can be viewed by time/location/ID and we can create meta information from that. (Yes, there are security/privacy issues.) [Joi Ito's Web] 11:16:56 PM  comment []

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