The Mother of All Moblog Mashups

Warning: This post contains a lot of geekery. Run while you can.

Moblogging is very cool. Or very geeky depending on your viewpoint. Yes, very geeky is probably the better description. I have spent the majority of my blogging career connected to the Internet through dial-ups and cell phone modems so I’m always interested in ways to do cool stuff on my blog without a high-speed connection

Mashable has an article on moblogging: 7 Tools For Blogging On Your Phone. The author Sean P. Aune mentions several ways of blogging through your phone. The only one that I ever used was the mobile blogging feature in Blogger. That system now allows you to send photos (and also sound files, I believe) directly to your blog.

Last year you might remember the Dinthi Day posts. Each day, I posted a photo and text about our life in an African village. The system I used was http://travellerspoint.com. Traveller’s Point allows you to create an email address known only to you that automatically posts your message plus attached photo to your own moblog. I’m no longer using that system because the mother of all moblogging mashups has arrived…

Flickr has a system that allows you to post photos to your Flickr account by sending them to an email address. In addition you can also send them simultaneously to the blog of your choice. For a long time this system was down but it has now been working fine for several months.

Almost any entry on this blog that has a big photo and not much text was either posted directly from my cell phone or sent from my computer. To get to the setup for moblogging on Flickr go to Your Account > Email. The nice thing about the Flickr system is that I’m pretty confident that Flickr is not going to disappear any time soon so my photos are safe there. I actually use three different Flickr accounts so that I can post photos to three different blogs! Afri-Kers Photo Blog and mozifoto are also powered by this mashup.

One of the other keys to my being able to blog at all has been Windows Live Writer. I can do all my writing offline and then just sign on, publish and sign off again. I actually use it to post to five different blogs although 90% of my posts are on this blog. And since we’re talking about my obsessive blog behavior, I do most of my blogging Monday through Saturday between 5AM and 7AM but I check up on comments and feeds throughout the day.

I recommend moblogging to you as a way of promoting your message without being tied to your desk. I’ll finish with a strange story. Last week I was moblogging my trip around Mozambique in a Cessna. At one point I was taking a picture of the side of a church and was unexpectedly very emotionally moved to the point of getting teary-eyed. I realized that the reason that happened is that by taking that photo and posting it to my blog my two worlds collided. Normally, I’m able to isolate the two. But seeing this “church” that looked more like a goat shed and knowing that on that same day many of my friends from the affluent west would be seeing it too impacted me. Was I crying because of Africa’s poverty? Was I ashamed of our affluence? Whatever the case, moblogging is cool in that way. It confronts us with the world we otherwise might never see. In the process we are richer for knowing about their poverty if it moves us to cry for brothers and sisters who are suffering while we sit in comfort.