Grant Holliday

Subscribe to my moblog: http://moblog.ozgrant.com/ (feed)

If you’ve spoken to Adam Cogan lately, you’ll know that Michael’s/Delicate Genius’s moblog has been at the top of his mind since he appeared on it.

A moblog is a blog published directly to the web from a phone or other mobile device.

Initially I dismissed a moblog of my own as a TWOT, but the idea of having one started to grow on me. Lately I’ve been looking into flickr, GPSs and Geocoding photos and thought that’s what I wanted to do - take lots of photos with a real camera, geocode them and upload them to flickr.

Later in the week Adam wanted to know how to setup a moblog and I couldn’t help but start looking into how it could be done and the idea grew on me. It turns out that it’s quite simple to get something up an running, with minimal/no cost.

These are the essential components:

• Mobile phone equipped with a camera
• Mobile data plan
• Ability to send emails from your phone (I use a hosted exchange provider with ActiveSync)
• A flickr account
• A blog that you can post to

Going a step further, I wondered how I can make the best use of this content I’m producing. So I decided to push the content into my social networks (facebook & twitter) for maximum exposure:

This is a quick how-to of what I did to get it up and running:

• Create a magic “flickr upload by email” address
• Add the magic address to your phone’s address book. I use “#Moblog” as the name so that it shows at the top of my contact list.
• Configure your phone’s camera settings to a level that’s acceptable to you (see below).
• Add your blog to your flickr account
• Sign-up to twitterfeed.com and add your blog’s RSS feed
• Add the Simply RSS application to Facebook
• Add your blog’s RSS feed to the RSS app.

Since mobile data is so expensive, you want to keep an eye on how big the images are that you’re sending. I’ve found the following settings on my i-Mate JamIn acceptable for now:

• Capture mode: Photo
• Capture format: JPEG
• Capture size: Medium (320×240)
• JPEG Quality: Basic
• = ~31Kb image file
• = ~42Kb when sent via email
• = 120 photos a month (of a 5MB quota & ignoring other traffic)
• = ~4 photos a day

That’s how my moblogging system is set up, stay tuned to see how it goes.