Slashdot Mirror
Blogging With Camera Phones
Zastrossi writes "The Register reports that NewBay Software, "is to offer software to mobile operators that will enable mobile phone users to create and maintain Weblogs or 'blogs' using only their phones." Sounds like a pretty sound idea, particularly in that they're selling to the telcos
as opposed to consumers. SMS was one revenue source for mobile providers, will camera phones become another?"
But the whole blog thing is starting to get boring.
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
Surely it'll be pretty damn' easy to /. a mobile phone? Multiprocessor Nokias, anybody???
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
So do they have a workaround for the tiny "keyboards" that cell phones have? Seems like this would only work for an image-only blog.
to make FP!
Monday see the 3 gray walls around me... Tuesday see the 3 gray walls around me... Wednsday see the 3 gray walls around me... Thursday see the 3 gray walls around me... Friday see the 3 gray walls around me... Saturday see 4 white walls around me... Sunday see 4 white walls around me...
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
One of the things that I love about my Palm and has made it into something I couldn't live without it my fold-up stowaway keyboard. Fast text entry is very important. I don't want to have to press the numeric keypad to enter text. Period.
Will these phones have a keyboard attachment?
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Have you ever looked at the per-meg charge for cell phones? This would become very expensive, very quickly.
You can't grep a dead tree.
Will camera phones become another source of revenue, like SMS? The only incentive that ever existed for telcos to launch camera phones was that they can make more revenue.
Sounds like a waste of time. Blogging with your phone will only result in mis-typed entries with poorly lit, poorly framed and blurry photos of famous landmarks that you can't quite make out and the result looks kind of like New Jersey or unrecognizable people who aren't particularly attractive or even remotely intersting even if drugs and/or alcohol were involved at 3:22AM when they were filmed on the way to yet another bar or club overcharging due to the lateness of the hour or the so called exclusivity of the place. Eck.
What's next? Being able to create and maintain Weblogs from computers?? What an incredible age we live in!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Now the CowboyNeil option will come with a picture. The HORROR! THE HORROR!
The camgirl/guy, IM, and the Blog.
Mmmm....mobile camgirl diaries.....
-----------
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Pajonet.com
If only somebody can invent software that would make the random writings/thoughts of millions of nitwits worth reading.
THAT would be a blog revolution, my friends.
At first I thought, "Phoneblogs, what a stupid idea because those phone keypads are a bitch to type on!" Then I thought, "What if they're using a speech to text engine?"
After reading through the site and finding out there is no voice to text, I verified my original thought, "Phoneblogs, what a stupid idea"
Maybe I shouldn't crap on it too much though, it's still in it's infancy and *could* be cool, But how many journalist do you know that crank out stories on a 12 key keyboard? Didn't think so.
I'll bet all 7 people in the target demographic snap this one up like hotcakes...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Admittedly, there may be 10 or less that are worthy of a visit, or can justify their reason to be, but far more often than not, I don't see the point. "Everyone Can Be A Publisher", but I question, Should They?
Over-exposed schoolgirl victim of high-tech bullying
about ill eagle payper liesense stock markup FUDgePackers
look for va.msn.net, ticker: (VAST)?
I only use my sanyo-5300 so I can remember hot women the next day... since I tend to drink a bit on the heavy side whilst I'm out about town. :)
I don't know whether "moblogging" will take off or not, but I'm sure telcos will make no money from it, because blogging does not require any help from the network. Blogging is like wi-fi: it's a product, not a service, so people aren't going to pay service fees for it.
A site already exists for the T-Mobile/Danger Sidekick -- Hiptop Nation. It's a blog site for multiple users to post images from the camera included with the Sidekick. I designed a personal blogger similar in functionality to this one for my own personal site too using my Win2k server, an SMTP sink and IIS. I hate blogs, but picture blogs are kind of interesting...
Not that scores of people are doing this already using the Danger Sidekick, or anything.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
The law may have changed, but when I lived in NYC, people had to get permission to use your image if they were shooting film or taking photos for publication. I wonder how blogging one's picture phone will play into such privacy issues?
That said, I could see how this would be useful, or at least interesting when a news story breaks, e.g. train derailment, so we can all glare at the dead bodys instead of waiting until we get home to watch the cable news.
My worst fear
--- have you healed your church website?
Do we really NEED more Blogs?
The people who make this software should look into their hearts and consider this question before unleashing it on the world
Anyone else feel that there's probably a direct relation between the growing popularity of blogging and the growing number of unemployed IT workers?
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Do you really think other people are actually reading it?
Those hits on your counter are your friends and family and the 15 million you bumped it up to initially to make yourself feel important.
Frankly there is just to much "look at me, I've got something to say" these days...
(Please note that I appreciate replies as I feel my contributions here are worth something.)
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
What's the deal with these? I mean Christ, people are acting like it's the first time that people are keeping a journal of their daily activities on the Internet. I don't quite understand why this has become the "new hotness."
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Another service for cellcos to dance out to make you ignore that you cant get a bleedin phone call on your cell to go through. I know I'm excited.
-- Insert wisdom here:
With my Danger Sidekick. I kept a photo-log of my christmas/new years vacation. A little bit o' perl and some simple back-end stuff, and i was on my way.
More interesting people would blog. I would probably read the blogs of Linus Torvalds or Stephen Hawking or George Dubya or AlGore, famous important people and such.
/.
I have no interest in what Pete Johnson from Mahwah NJ thought of while on the city bus on his way to the free clinic (sorry pete, but I really dont).
However I think the people that I would want to read the blogs of probably are too busy with something else to be blogging. Maybe theres a connection there. Maybe bloggers have the time to blog because their life is boring to start with anyways. Thats not just a troll/flamebait, I dont blog but I might as well with all the comments I have posted here on
I wrote a quick perl script to do this for a friend who has a camera phone.
/etc/aliases) which routes it to a perl script which parses out the email content and attachments (pictures from the phone) and posts them to a MySQL database. The front-end of the project involved CGI scripts that would talk to the MySQL database and display the data to the web.
It picks up the incoming mail via a sendmail pipe (in
Result? Real-time blogging from the camera with pictures and text! Total lines of code? Less than 100.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
this could be useful! imagine if you were stuck in a building collapse, and a rescue worker posted pictures of himself masturbating with a camera phone! You'd be saved!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Badly mispelt text, multiple posts of the same thing over and over, endless mindless rants...
Oh, wait a minute..
What the phones really need is good voice-recognition software, so the blogger can just start babbling and the results will be instantly posted.
"Wait, did I say 'Thursday'? I meant 'Friday'! No, wait - don't record that. Don't post this. Are you still posting?? Stop!!"
Soon, every conversation ever held could be blogged for all to see. Just what the world needs. More mental diarrhea.
It is estimated that over 500,000 have been created over the past 18 months and are now starting up at the rate of about 5,000 daily.
And are receiving their last post ever at the rate of about 7,000 daily.
That means, instead of just *reading* about some whiney college girl complaining about the sandwich she had for lunch, and how the waiter was a total asshole, and how that new movie looks pretty cool, ya know, I can actually *see* these amazing things that I've never even imagined!
These certainly are exciting times!
GSM was really, really smart engineering, which took off because the various stakeholders (wireless carriers, handset manufacturers, network equipment providers) pooled their resources and ideas and achieved a great standard which served everybody (even, if not most the users).
SMS was actually a byproduct of that standard and nobody had an idea how much it would take off. It's immensly successful and a nice source of additional revenue for the carriers.
Camera phones however seems more to be a product of marketing cree^H^H^H^Hexperts in the sense that they try to create a need, which otherwise doesn't exist.
Of course every industry player is very interested in multimedia messaging to succeed. The manufacturers like to sell new, snazzy and expensive phones, carriers charge an arm and a leg and have a huge interest in mms taking off and network equipment providers can sell nice upgrades to the wireless infrastructure.
Now if the consumers play nice, or if this is another wap fiasko in the making only time will tell.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Friend of my from workplace bought nokia phone with digicam stuff. It seems that this phone can send those images as email to someone.. Well, i set his (hosted) unix box in a way that when ever it receives email from the phone, all attached jpg's will get saved to a web folder..
...
That folder has some php gallery code and everything runs smoothly.
I didnt really need anything fancy to acomplish this.. ripmime, procmail and and that phpslideshow i downloaded from freshmeat.
I guess i could set him up with "blogging" options too so that he can send email containing just text too so that his blog would get updated too.
Not *that* big deal you know
yush
Here's what you do:
- get a Bluetooth phone
- get a Bluetooth-capable computer or adapter
- write blog on computer
- take pictures with fancy, real digital camera
- upload
- uh, profit?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Where did the term "blog" come from? Is it an abbreviation, or just slang?
In a couple years we'll be seeing the same this with video portable devices.
You: "Hey, where's those hot babes I met last night when I was drunk?"
Your Phone: "I deleted them, trust me, you don't want to see what you did last night."
The new-tek version of "Chewing your arm off".
Another use for picture-cell phones: Over-exposed schoolgirl victim of high-tech bullying
And don't forget this gem regarding voyeurism with cell phones. My favorite quote?
The girl was alerted to his presence by the noise emitted by the phone camera's shutter. She turned around to catch Hamano with his hands between her legs
Many people in their 20s find cell phone instant message to be very tedious with no keyboard.
On the other hand, the youths of Japan/Asia, and Europe are having a blast with cell phones and instant messaging.
Damn, I feel old.
--------
Free your mind.
bad input system + bad camera + bad connection + expensive phone = good?
Somebody tell me who's making the decisions at the telecom industry. Do they read slashdot?
Next fiasco. This one is easy.
I'd do a seperate blog from my cell that only includes important info about dropped phone calls, delayed text messages etc.
I wouldn't even have to include all the info for phone calls cuz I could compare the blog entry to my phone bill.
I would then have a nice comprehensive list of things I can complain about.
Now if the companies actually paid attention to complaints and did things that go towards progress, I might even end up with less negative entries and more blog entries that indicate "Great Reception @ somewhere!" or "Fastest Sports Alert Ever!"
Of course, the geeky thing would be to not even consider paying for such a blog-type service.
All I'd have to do is write one or two perl scripts and do some procmail tinkering.
I already have my cell phone / procmail setup to feed me certain useful info from websites or to check if i have important email that I need to look at. Why would I even want to pay for web access through my cell phone? That's what a computer is for. I'm never in THAT much of a hurry.
I'm just glad I have unlimited text messaging.
Incidentally (and at the risk of getting /.'d) I run a WebLog that allows anyone to contribute by text. Going for over a year now.
http://weblog.vanhegan.net
</plug>
Great. So now instead of just TALKING on their cell phones while their driving, people can actually update their blog! No sir. No danger here.
I wrote my own skinnable website package which includes multi-blog functionality with all the usual features. A few months ago I added a wireless skin (WML) and can now post to my blog and change my mood from my cell phone. While I don't often post to my blog via the phone, I do have a private blog section that I post to sometimes. It's basically a "note to self" type thing and it's very handy typing a quick idea here and there via my cell phone. It saves carrying around a PDA a lot of the time.
And yeah, blogs are lame and boring and all that, but they're damn handy to remember what on earth I did yesterday.
Seems like a cool idea, but my method is so much easier. I own a Sony Ericsson T68i and a Sony Clie NX70V. Together they make a great pair. I use the Clie to write messages, email, take pictures, and then use the T68i to send them to friends, or to a website. I haven't really done much blogging with the devices, but it would be relatively easy with the built in keyboard on the Clie.
Hopefully sometime soon Sony will get off their butt and release the Bluetooth Memory Stick for my Clie here in the US so I don't have to use IR to send with my T68i.
----------
word to your moms... I came to drop bombs...
This actually could have some practical use as well...imagine being stuck inside a building during a collapse. With a camera phone, the rescue worker could take pictures of herself masturbating, and upload them to the Internet. You'd be saved!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Most of the people I know with phone-camera thingo's are using them most to send pictures of their various dangly bits. Like the telephone, 8mm film, video, broadband Internet, DVD and so on, new tech is likely to be boosted significantly by those seeking/sending pr0n.
:)
"Yo, I'm texting with one hand, baby!!!! See!??!!"
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Considering that most phones (picture phones or no) only have the phone keypad as a keyboard for entering anything, I guess we get to really see if a picture is worth a thousand words :-)
Then again, there's always the SMS extreme shorthand for captions...
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
the submitter writes "SMS was one revenue source for mobile providers, will camera phones become another?" Probably, but they wont get my money for one until i get usable photos, plus i'm picky and want several devices in one, like GPS, moblie phone, PDA, mp3 player, FRS/GMRS radio, AM/FM radio, and so on, if i can have one device to drag around then I'll buy a computer smaller than a laptop.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
I setup a website to play with this idea Clunky.net but I don't have the time to maintain it at the moment. May resurrect it if it becomes popular..
The Danger Hiptop aka T-Mobile Sidekick has a built in camera and qwerty style keyboard. Even before the phone hit the streets, people had 'photo blogs' set up. Typically, the user takes a picture, attaches it to an email with the blog entry in the body of the email and sends it to a special email address that is site specific.
a sp?phon eid=165302
More can be found out about the Danger Hiptop at;
http://www.danger.com/products.php
or;
http://www.t-mobile.com/products/overview.
and a photoblog may be found at;
http://www.hiptop.bedope.com
I don't understand the hatred of blogs that seems so widespread here. Some are good, some are bad, but none of them force you to read them. A good blogger writing about a trip to the grocery store can be really entertaining or enlightening. It's all about the quality of the work and how well it resonates with you. I think it's really amazing that people are willing to offer up there perspective and experience to the world for free. And the camera idea is a really great way to very literally let someone "see the world through your eyes." --mike d
To see this concept already in action visit Hiptop Nation.
http://netninja.com/files/mobilelj/
This reminds me of UPhone with images instead of sound. From the site, The UPHONE is a phone-in interface to the web. Designed for immediate collaborative sound archiving & computerless web publishing.
And it seems we'll have the full blown version of it very soon. The book describes people who live "a recorded life" where every action they do is recorded via wireless camera on their watch...
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Actually, I noticed that article this morning and immediately fast-forwarded the idea 5-10+years into future. Imagine when technology makes it very easy to capture details about a subject and using an intelligent filtering agent enter it into a /. type info stream that's scrubbed and broadcast to consumers based on their tastes. maybe you want to see/hear/read about every bit of info that happens about X...
Blogging is stupid and very self-indulgent at this point, but imagine if someone were to commercialize the process and technology like this is in the hands of every person.
scary, but it's just the idea of the masses using the same sort of tech the government plans to implement as part of homeland security department...
"Sounds like a pretty sound idea, particularly in that they're selling to the telcos as opposed to consumers. SMS was one revenue source for mobile providers, will camera phones become another?"
I don't know I would think seeling to the telcos in inherently dangerous as the telcos would at some point or another want to elbow them out of the market if it got good. Guess that's what patents and copyright are for. Of course, selling a service like this directly to the consumer would be insanely difficult so telcos are probably the only option.
Combined with the cameras on phones, this would be a great technology... Instead of all text (or mainly anyways) blogs, you could easily snap a photo of yourself during a class or eating lunch and embed it in your blog. Although some blogs are boring as sliced bread (Sorry, I'm too tired to think of a simile that makes sense), photos would certainly add spice to those that are fun to read, and a new dimension into reading about others' lives.
You could do the same thing with a camera, but good cameras are larger, so why not use a nice cell phone to take pictures, blog, and add pictures to your blog all at the same time?
Help a college student
1. Even the most boring, inarticulate person on earth sees a lot of cool things every day. /. was) - little homegrown sites like Fotolog.net have had this photos-to-blog-via-email thing covered since last year.
2. What this company is offering doesn't seem all that complex or all that innovative (although I guess getting the press release posted on
(I've become totally obsessed with Fotolog - people actually update their blogs with worthwhile and interesting photos regularly, and people actually visit and comment on each other's stuff.)
Whoever provides the mechanisms though, it should get interesting as more of these camera phones get out there...
A colleague of mine has been running a photo-blog (Phlog?) for a couple of years now, driving everyone in the department crazy with his photo obsession.
I don't see what cell-phones have to do with this. He has a fuji FinePix camera that he takes everywhere. Once a day, the entire camera is synced onto his image-server, which serves them to the internet. The photos are viewable over here. Every viewer can add comments to any image.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
"Captian's Blog Star Date 4815.6, Im starting to think someone should have spoken up back in 2003, 'blog' who came up with that?"
sig. My new years resolution? 2560 x 1024.
grey walls?
l t. asp
buy yourself some brightly colored paint and get to work.
http://www.sherwin-williams.com/diy/color/defau
I'm using my PCS phone and laptop to send this right now. It keeps my /. reading off the company connection and watchful eyes.
Sprint stopped selling the connection cables for their Vision Phones as soon as they came out with the unlimited plans. I bought my cable on Ebay and downloaded the management software and it works like a charm and doesn't appear anywhere on my bill.
I hope sprint doesn't track me down if I'm in violation of my plan, but I can't find anything in the contract that prohibits it (or allows it for that matter).
I wrote an email-to-blogger interface for my Hiptop.
It could easily be extended to use LiveJournal or any other XML-RPC based weblog because the Perl libraries already support it.
See http://hipme.com/software/blogrouter.
And I'm surprised that it hasn't been a /. feature yet.
r d. html
http://www.iptel-now.de/HOWTO/CHATBOARD/chatboa
Check out CarlaZone which is a blog with cell-phone camera image updates. She used to carry around a tablet computer with CDPD, but the Sanyo 5300 has better battery life and a form-factor you can't beat (especially if you already carry a cellphone).
In Korea they already have full-motion video cameras, check out the story on CellCamZone.
One of the biggest blog hosting site, Blogspot.com, has been blocked in China since Jan.9th, 2003
...what kind of people would use this technology-for-the-sake-of-technology, and, even worse, what kind of people would want to read it. [shudder]
With the blog software I use, you can configure it to post a blog entry from an e-mail... and I can e-mail from my phone. It's just that easy... ...I could even do it through the web browser on my Treo, but e-mail's still faster.
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
And should be fairly easy to set up a home one, a
/. Journal does not change its name, all is ok-ish with the world I guess, only newbies will call 'em blogs and everyone else can look at them as if they are shit.
sms 2 email gateway and your away.
But "blogs" wtf did web logs/online diarys become "blogs!?
Well as long as the
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Which would be why telecoms companies have been doing so well recently, right...?
Telecom companies have no clue what is going to be the next hit. GSM, SMS and i-mode were surprise successes; IDSN, WAP and 3G have been disastrous failures. The companies are to some degree aware of this, and they hire legions of geeks to help them forecast the future, but often greed takes over -- and sometimes the geeks are just wrong. (For instance, I guessed right on the failure of 3G and WAP, and I'm pretty sure GPRS and MMS will take off, but if you'd followed my advice and dumped Nokia stock for SonyEricsson you would have regretted it.)
Cheers,
-j. (a geek in telecoms)
Something that took 100 or so lines of code does NOT need a sourceforge project. Start one yourself if you REALLY want it...
Now if the consumers play nice, or if this is another wap fiasko in the making only time will tell.
Picture messages have been a huge hit in Japan, J-Phone alone has picked up over 5 million subscribers for its Sha-Mail service in the last year and doubled its data ARPU in the process (translation: the service is actually used and the operator is making a killing in per-byte fees).
The business model is clearly viable. It remains to be seen if GSM operators kill the golden goose by overcharging for messages, but rates seem to be becoming more reasonable and things are looking pretty good.
Cheers,
-j.
I am not sure if this would work or not but as the phones are bluetooth compatible and you can get bluetooth keyboards it should be possible to use them. Has anyone out there tried this yet??
personaly I find predictive text fine, occasionaly you have to add a word to the dictionary but it fairly fast.
I AM A GOLDEN GOD
in most states, you can broadcast video of anything in public and usually in the privacy of your home. When you add sound to the mix, it often becomes illegal (the laws were written for phone taps and 'bugs' that record only sound).
Making a law that requires permission from anyone in a video in public would kill news broadcasts "from the street" because you could not get permission from everyone walking or driving behind the newscaster.
There was a lawsuit recently by a man who was told by his friends that nude video of him was for sale on a gay porn site. The man had been a wrestler in college and during a meet in Michigan (I think), someone had set up hidden cameras in the locker room and filmed the guys getting dressed and undressed. Not only did the law permit this and prevent the unsuspecting men from stopping the sales of the tape, it did not require those making money from it to give any royalties to the 'stars', either.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Danger Sidekick.
I see MASSIVE rights management issues like
all of those agreements you have to get to use a famous/known building in your movie (e.g., Transamaerica building).
So will cellphone weblogs spend all of their time talking about the wonders of cellphone weblogs? Or are discussions about weblogs in general fair game?
i made my website frame/javascript free as much as possible, and can log in and use it from my sidekick, but that has a keyboard and real browser... and there is something inimicably cool about being able to tell people that you've just been on a date and the wine is drying nicely on your shirt... err... something like that?
I was having the same convo in reverse. How the whole slashDot karma circlejerk was getting boring... especially since it is just an new flavor of the Usenet thing, but with greater hierarchy and exclusions in place. And it is so hostile to those who don't think that the word "nerds" applies to them, or can unpack how "stuff that matters" is an in-your-face threat to a newbie who might wonder if his/her stuff matters.
Nice thing about blogs is it is not what the MOB thinks matters, but rather what the individual finds personally important, or wishes to share. It actually has more of that "America is about the Individual" which I usually find to be a problem, but in this case it is preferable to the SlashDot hivemind, which is half popularity contest, and half a 'first off the mark' game.
No, I like hearing grandmothers talk about their day. I like to hear people at the fringes talk about themselves, and I think young people should have a voice. I don't think it is that interesting when a bunch of dot.bombs or next-big-thingites sniff derisively at the world around them and find it not worth engaging in.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
Picture blogs are really not a new thing. Cyborg Logs (cyborglogs, or glogs have been around for years. See for example, a web glog from 1995.
The ark lands after The Flood. Noah lets all the animals out. Says he, "Go
and multiply." Several months pass. Noah decides to check up on the animals.
All are doing fine except a pair of snakes. "What's the problem?" says Noah.
"Cut down some trees and let us live there", say the snakes. Noah follows
their advice. Several more weeks pass. Noah checks on the snakes again.
Lots of little snakes, everybody is happy. Noah asks, "Want to tell me how
the trees helped?" "Certainly", say the snakes. "We're adders, and we need
logs to multiply."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...