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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?"
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.
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?
That would be a really cool idea actually... A sort of multimedia blog.
Imagine you go on holiday, you have your mobile phone with you. Every time you see something cool (let's hope you have good taste), you use your camera phone to take a picture of it and speak in a short message to attach to the picture. With some sort of text-to-speech package that would be very cool. Then instead of sending a post card back, you send the url of the blog which is automatically created from this, and your friends can follow your holidays and feel a bit sunny in sympathy.
That's actually something which people might pay for. The holiday use is only one, what about integrating this idea into a sort of community... everyone in the community (say of friends from univ) keeps a sort of multimedia blog from their phone, sharing things that they're doing to maintain the group bonding, etc... I know I would pay good money to keep in touch like that with my friends from uni.
Damn, the uses are practically infinite... Anyone else feel that this could be a killer app for 3G phones?
Daniel
Carpe Diem