Test from cell

I think that there are several points, Rob. No either-or here. Your point is one-- blog anywhere, anywhen. Which is cool. Not necessarily what I want to do, but hey, I can see how it's desireable and useful. (and thanks for the blogger mention; I'll check it out)


My point, thinking about what to do when the unthinkable happens, is another. I saw Scoble post this, thought about the idea I've got ruminating -- a blogger field day where we all test out the less usual means of posting to blogs-- and saw it fit right in.

But my point piggybacks yours. You have the OPTION to blog when you want, using non-typical (seated before computer keyboard) means. Which option you'd really really like to use in case the whole joint gets shaken by an 8.0 quake.

So, carry on. I'll only hang out here to see if LayZ rousts him/herself from solely wanting examples to actually providing any about LayZ's cel phone experience in NYC on 9/11.

I can't beleive how some of you people are totally missing the point. Being able to blog from a phone like a T-Mobile MDA means that you can leave a laptop at home when you go to blog a conference or something. It also means that you can publicize anything you want, any time you want.

Blogger has had mobile blogging available for a year or so. I just send an MMS (photos, audio, and text) to go@blogger.com and I'm done. I don't use it that often (I will at PAX this weekend), but it's great to know that if I want to leave the laptop behind, I can.

It's not a matter of being able or needing to blog in an emergency. It's a matter of having the OPTION to blog whenever the fancy strikes you.

LayZ,

"I guess neither of you were in NYC trying to make a cell phone call during 9/11"

You guess correctly. Would you add to your guess and your "waiting for examples" and provide some examples of your own? What it was like? What happened? What did you do? What were the results?

Katrina comes the closest, but I’m not sure how effective that was in actually dealing with the hurricane.

There's also the Tsunami. I was at the BlogHer community assistance panel, where Dina Metha (from Mumbai, India) discussed best practices learned from the tsunami. She said SMS was instrumental to communication. There was also discussion of needed (and existing) technology for SMS to RSS and vice versa. Considering the lack of notification, had there been some way to get word out -- in a two-way manner, not just cel-phone to blog, lives might have been saved.

You mention "life or death situations" which defines the scope too narrowly, in my opinion. Whither blogging or phoning on flight 93. Emergency situations aren't as narrow as that.

I'm thinking about longer-near-term emergency. Where wide-scale damage from quake or tornado or hurricane or blizzard/ice storm takes out communication for an extended period of time.

Comparing the effectiveness of making a phone call vs. texting/blogging on flight 93 and assumes that the emergency situation is isolated from an overall hit to infrastructure. I am thinking of situations where the hit to infrastructure is what prolongs emergency conditions for hours, days, weeks.

I was just reading, for example, that the San Andreas Fault intersects the California Aqueduct in three places, and that should a quake breach that area, Southern California can be without Aqueduct water for 3-6 MONTHS. Obviously different from electricity or net, but an example of the scope of disruption. And one which would coincide with electricity, gas leaks, phone service.

At that point, it may require too much bandwidth to place a synchronuos two-way call out. But text, with asynchronicity, can slip through.

Plus, for families not at epicenter, the "I haven't heard from her/him/them" perspective extends the state of "it's life or death" for hours or days. Tho the ones caught at epicenter may have survived (no longer life or death), until word gets out to families and friends, it's still life or death to them.

"Help local people how?" Establishing communication, getting word out. Helps local people. "Tell 'em I'm okay" is a help. Describing to world at large best way to communicate (send SMS messages) helps. The directNIC data center in New Orleans did have backup power. They used the net/chat/IM to get people on the outside to help 'em research questions about how best to operate their generator. So a first outbound word may pose questions for those outside to answer and get back to those within. Or heck, to blog "we're okay, we need help, tune in to ham radio frequency [blah]" to direct people to the reliable means of communication.

Ultimately, you never know WHAT is going to happen. So the exercise of trying different ways to post to a blog, and setting all that stuff up beforehand increases one's options when the worst hits. If the net routs around outages, all this is an attempt to try your own rout-arounds.

Another point on the local level. I went to a city council meeting, post-Katrina -- I'm in larger L.A. area, we have fires and earthquakes, not floods -- and volunteered my services as a blogger in an emergency. Having done so, I figure that I'd best bone up on as many non-traditional ways to establish communication to outside world as possible. Which is a help to the local people.

You tech folks are mighty amusing.

Does it have to be new to get you all hot & bothered? Is it not enough for Robert to allow you into the small as well as the large triumphs?

@33 I guess neither of you were in NYC trying to make a cell phone call during 9/11.

You cited examples of using a cell phone to notify people of your status. Calling someone, sending an SMS. I don't see examples of where updating your blog is really a needed emergency service. I'm still waiting for examples of where is critical to be able to update your blog during an emergency.

@29 If you classifying notifying the world via your blog that someone had a baby as an EMERGENCY, well, your bar is much lower than mine.

On the runway? Huh? Why the hell wouldn't you just CALL someone? I mean, I'm sure the people on Flight 93 wished they could have BLOGGECD about what was happening on their flight, rather than actually CALL someone. That would have been MUCH MORE effective, dontcha think?

Again, looking for examples of NEEDING to BLOG from your cell phone DURING an EMERGENCY.

Katrina comes the closest, but I'm not sure how effective that was in actually dealing with the hurricane. Someone thousands of miles away is reading your updates on the hurricane. That helps the local people...how?

Susan is right on that one. The last service to go and the first back up in a disaster is usually cellular. Everyone, including emergency workers, tend to use them.

Josh: LiveJournal offers voice posting to paying users.

LayZ @ 25: I'm thinking about large-scale natural disasters that take down a region's infrastructure and services. (I'm also thinking about the person who blogged DURING Katrina from her Blackberry)

So, say LA gets hit by the big 8.0 quake. Widescale disruptions, tons of power outages. Intermittent communication services. The infrastructure is damaged, and what does work is severely overloaded. I'm alive, sustained some damage, and want to report out. My site is hosted on a server elsewhere in the country; *it* still is running. If I can just get a message out. Any message, a short message. A post from a cel phone, using SMS or something along those lines, where a brief text message can slip out amid all the traffic overcrowding the services, might have a chance to get out there.

(Now that I paint this scenario, I think I want to have an alternate email address or service that's hosted from elsewhere. Gmail works for that (it's in NorthernCalifornia vs. Southern California), but it doesn't work like having and registering your own domain where you can create your super-secret email address to send emails to that'll get posted on the blog.)

I have a domain name, so I'll prolly set up an account to do mail-to-blog and then send message to that mail address from my cel phone. Yes, it's differnet from whatever it is that Robert tried out, but I'm assuming that it's a similar idea.

Blogging from prison. Now that is revolutionary. Did you smuggle the mobile phone hidden within a big cake ?

>>@18 in exactly what type of EMERGENCY scenario would it be a matter of life or death to blog from your cell phone?


"She just had the baby. 6 lbs 5 oz. Everyone is okay."

I could think of a lot of others, probably not life or death, but if you don't have a PC with an internet connection (i.e. you're on a runway it can make the difference of being able to contact the general public or not.

"Start your email with" above should be followed by (less than)tag="x", "y", "z"(greater than)

>>Email doesn’t work cause you can’t tag via email.


It could if you parsed for it and had software to support it.

Start your email with

For the record my webpage had a section that would display messages from my phone (an old Nextel) back in 1999. Then in 2003 I had a whole blog that I did completely with my Sidekick. http://www.greenjem.com/blog/

It's a lot easier now.

Wake me up when you can talk into a cell phone and post that to a blog.

@18 in exactly what type of EMERGENCY scenario would it be a matter of life or death to blog from your cell phone?

So why not improve the blogging software so that you can tag via email?

The problem with the specialized software or specialized websites to make entries is that now I have to remember to have that software loaded on every mobile device I use, or remember what the URL is to access.... everytime I'm stuck on 520 I forget what Dave's NytRiver URL is :(

It seems that enabling a way to email or SMS blog entries would make the practice much more ubiquitous then another application or website to load.

Mike and PX: did I ever say this was revolutionary? I did NOT. I just said I was testing out a new piece of software. Sorry, the guy who did it asked me not to tell you about it, but, to do a freaking test post I needed to admit that I was doing something fun.

Anyway, the system worked, I'm sure you'll hear about it soon.

It's not revolutionary and I know there are other ways to do it.

Email doesn't work cause you can't tag via email.

I'm with the people that say this is nothing new, unless the system makes it easy to type on a tiny keypad without getting RSI on your fingernails after three posts.

Here are a couple of links, hot off the first page of Googling "sms to blog":

http://www.bestkeptsimple.org/mpost/

and a test:

http://m-post.blogspot.com/

Please, don't give the service up, but give us a few more clues as to why you think this is revolutionary.

Regards,

If your cell has a bluetooth connection, why not just buy a bluetooth keyboard? I *think* that would be cheaper. Or, and I'm not sure that mobile phones have them, if you have a USB port, you can get these little keyboards that are rubber and roll up. But, the disadvantage with those is that you can't very easily use them in your lap.

>> Having dedicated blogging software does help

Robert, posting to a blog from a celphone is an excellent thing to do as a test for emergency communications.

At BlogHer's workshop on Community Assistance (see Christine.net's posts on it here: http://www.christine.net/2006/07/best_practices...), someone mentioned the way that Ham Radio Operators have a Field Day -- away from home, household electricity, etc., to a remote location, in order to practice communications for an emergency. Someone suggested having a blogger field day, and I said, hey, maybe we can coordinate it with the ham radio field day. I wrote a long post about it. On my To Do list is to get together with some local ham radio operators to find out more about what they do.

http://www.2020hindsight.org/2006/08/06/disaste...

and to then talk about ways we can work together if they're amenable. I think that a dedicated effort to communicate with blogs using non-traditional means -- like what you're doing with this test post -- is exactly what's needed to prepare for communications in the event of a disaster.

Having dedicated blogging software does help in my experience. Naturally I'm biased but Lifeblog (www.nokia.com/lifeblog) is the pioneer in this space, and it's major benefits are that it allows you to blog >10Mb videos (typical limit for an email server), and selecting multiple photos for immediate publishing is easier than creating an email with multiple entries. Additionally, having a posting history comes in handy.

No, a photoblog is a blog, it's just that you seem so amazed/enamored that now you can do it to your regular blog. That's nothing new or amazing.
Is that really new to you?

PXLated: I moblog photos from my phone on my Flickr feed. What, you now saying a photo blog isn't a blog?

Sorry Robert but...Wow, a few posts ago you were claiming to be the Blog King. Now we discover that you are "just now" figuring out MoBlogging?
Hmmmmm! Where ya been? Probably too busy writing a standard blogging book!
;-)

Now you know why I wouldn't even consider a cell phone without a full keyboard.

Get the LG 9800, great keyboard and best 3GP out there, imho. Not a true smart phone tho...so this software might not run on it, but if it was WAP or webcentic...

But I want great video on my cell phone, and the 9800 is the best thus far...imho.

Re: #5 - I like Windows Live Spaces' support for email blogging (http://spaces.live.com)

Using public YahooGroups (http://groups.yahoo.com) with email posting turned-on is also an interesting way to go.

For some interesting mobile blogging scenarios, check out ontella: http://www.ontela.com/

Robert,

I enjoy your blog tremendously, and I to am a SJSU alumnus.

However, there is a general problem in the blogosphere and more specifically with your blog.

I like following the tech blogs because it gives me a heads up on new technologies, but, for those of us not privy ot the inner circle, do not appreciate the the self-gratuitous posts that read, "I can't tell you about this application."

It's akin to the old schoolyard behavior of telling someone, "I have a secret and your not cool enough to know"

It seems as if a post happens like this once a day, and is very frustrating. If and when the the application comes out you mention how wonderful you are to have known about it.

-Anonymous Coward

Writing isn't as important as reading it from a PDA or cellphone! I would recommend WordPress Mobile Edition.

http://www.douglaskarr.com/2006/08/19/my-wordpr...

Cheers!
Doug

Thats just what I was looking for, when will you be able to release this info?

Guy

Text blogging from a phone - that's so old ;) ;)

What is wrong with the "email a post to my blog" thinking? MSN Spaces has it down, wordpress is behind, but it is still a very efficient way to post from anywhere

You should try with the Nokia E61... Great experience ;-)

Is that a blackberry pearl ? ;-)

Whoa, blogging from a cellphone? This is revolutionary!

Come on Robert, keep up :D

Hi Robert, I am photoblogging from my K800i phone here in the Uk - works very well - I just post anything interesting - www.theappleofmyi.blogspot.com
The cool thing is - it comes ready configured to Blogspot so SE must have some tie up with Google. I wish it was configured to Wordpress!