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Start blogging from your mobile phone

James Thornton

James Thornton

  • Updated:

Mobile blogging is a doddle with SplashBlogIf you haven’t got your own blog yet then, quite frankly, you’re a loser. Actually, I haven’t got one and I fear that my usual excuse (that I’m an ‘outdoorsy type,’ who doesn’t want to sit around on a PC all day) won’t wash anymore. That’s because it’s becoming increasingly easy to set up and manage a blog from your mobile phone. The scope for mobile blogging has been affirmed by the fact that Movable Type and TypePad have just announced their own plug-ins for the iPhone.

If you want to get into ‘moblogging’ then you’ll have to choose the right application. The best options for us mortals without an iPhone are the Nokia-owned Lifeblog, and the rather excellent SplashBlog. The former of the two is very easy to manage because it automatically builds an organic timeline as you take photos and videos and send and receive messages. After quickly scrolling through these images and events you can save them to a ‘Favorites’ timeline for rapid access.

Youn then need to sign up with the TypePad service, from where you can access your LifeBlog timeline, pick and and choose the images or messages you want to add, insert some text and publish to your blog.

SplashBlog works in a very similar way, only it allows you to work directly within a web interface. The basic layout of the interface makes it easy to find your way around and the app makes clever use of hotkeys, meaning that posting a photo or blog entry is only ever a few clicks away. The range of features within SplashBlog is arguably greater than LifeBlog but ultimately it suffers from the same problem, in that it can take ages to upload content to your blog. Even a fairly low-res picture can take about 10 seconds to put onto a page, and until mobile operators furnish us with more bandwidth, moblogging will be a pursuit only for hobbyists and casual bloggers. Maybe I’ll wait ’til next year then.

James Thornton

James Thornton

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