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Tuesday, October 10, 2006 |
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So finally mobile operators in India wake up to the power and the money-spinning potential of blogging and social networking. The Economic Times this morning has an article - 'Now, mobile phones invade the blogosphere' with service opearators like Reliance and Idea Cellular offering up moblogging sites.
"Reliance Communications (RCL) is set to be the first operator to
host a blogging site in India. "Our subscribers, who have MMS
and video capability, will be able to send blog entries using mobile telephones.
In case of other phones, only text blogging is possible," Mahesh Prasad,
president - Reliance World, told ET.
RCL has partnered with the Hyderabad-based mobile content provider IMI Mobile for moblogging. RCL will charge Rs 5 per MMS/SMS for posting a blog. Users will have to MMS picture or video to 1234 with the keyword 'mblog' and they will be automatically registered on mblog. A return SMS specifies the user's password and the website URL for her blog. "Bloggers can have a 'buddy list' specified from the phonebook, which can include both Reliance and non-Reliance subscribers so that everytime a blog is posted, they get an SMS alert informing them to check out the specified URL," he explained. To view the blog, one has to visit www.relianceinfo.com/mblog and key in their password. "The community of bloggers is growing. We want to ensure that pictures taken on mobiles are not left just in the phone." ".... Idea Cellular is offering moblogging through mygamma.com, a mobile networking community. Idea users can log on to this website and upload their pictures and messages and share ringtones. The service can be subscribed to for Rs 10 for a week or Rs 25 for two weeks (with online points). The company receives around 3,000 renewals every month for this service." Earlier this year, Nokia launched Nokia M-Blog for GPRS-enabled N-series mobile phone users - however this may be restricted as you need GPRS to moblog. The Hindu had a review of rediffiland, the first Indian portal to offer moblogging, a short while ago: " With technology like this, no government can ever hope to gag or throttle public opinion, or restrict it within its own boundaries. The Moblog knows no boundaries. Indians could read about Moblogs, but had difficulty in experiencing the excitement, because most free blog services are not tailored for direct uploading from mobile devices. All that has changed this month with the inauguration by India's pioneering portal, Rediff, of a special site tailored for mobile blogging. The site can be accessed at www.rediffiland.com. Once you have registered at the site, you can use your mobile phone to create your own Moblog, by SMSing the desired text. Mobloggers will also have the added advantage that they can reach the huge audience of Rediff's regular viewers numbering around 40 million. Right now, the Rediff Moblog service is in beta or test stage, and is free to use. There is even the possibility that Rediff might share revenue with bloggers who drive traffic to their sites. That may or may not happen, but the ability to create your own personal blog content is now only an SMS away." And Mobylog seems to have taken off too. Om Malik, who feels camera phones are the biggest opportunity to make money, has been saying "any company that makes it simple and easy for users to upload their photos directly from a phone to their website/weblog, will find itself in the cat bird seat." Veer Bothra, our Mobile Pundit, feels:"With mobiles in India having four times the population of PCs, it is natural that the growth in blogging would be driven by mobile blogs or moblogs." I'd be interested to see whether these moblog opportunities build communities around sharing, and how. And how they deal with communication that is so essential in a social community - read Robert Young's feature on The Future of Social networks - Communication - where he says "The value of the wall (at MySpace) points to a very important dimension of building and running any web property that's driven by community...that communications ultimately serves as the anchor feature and the driver of retention and growth" Tags: moblog, moblogging, india, camera phones 9:33:05 AM  comment [] trackback []
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Copyright 2009 Dina Mehta
