Sunday, September 19, 2004

It had been a couple of years since I bought a wireless router, and I was having troubles that were traceable to my old Linksys router, so I bought a new Netgear router at Best Buy in Northgate. First the good news, it works. Now, more good news, all I had to do to configure it was click three times. It was able to figure out what kind of net connection I had, and automatically configured itself. The only small complaint I have about the setup is that the instructions are labored and complicated. Why not just say: First try it the simple way, it usually works, and that's all you have to do. I guess someone in marketing didn't trust the engineering? Anyway, nice work! 

Hey there was actually some sun today in Seattle. 

Oy I had a server meltdown. I have it mostly put back together now. Time for a walk, with Adam's latest Daily Source Code on my iPod. He says he's got his content studio all working, the scoop is on the MP3.  

Scoble: How your blog will get discovered. 

NY Times survey of spyware and adware. "...a program that creeps onto a computer's hard drive unannounced, is wrecking the Internet." 

What is Moblogging? 

I spent much of yesterday with Scoble, we went to the ballgame, then Pike Place Market, where he bought flowers for his wife Maryam, and then on to a Tully's coffee shop where we figured out what Moblogging is.

First, why is it important that I of all people know what Moblogging is? Okay, as Zero Mostel says, I'll tell you. (Sorry.) Blame Rebecca MacKinnon, my former Harvard colleague, and former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN, and friend of Joi Ito. Rebecca keeps telling me that I must have a session about Moblogging at BloggerCon. At the closing session of the last BC, I asked the room if they felt we should have one, and everyone said yes we should. However, unless we know what Moblogging is, if we were to have a discussion about it, it seems we would spend all our time debating what it is and whether or not it belongs at a BloggerCon. Those are exactly the kinds of meta-discussions that I like to avoid. At all costs. So I want to know what it is, and if it's worth discussing.

So Scoble and I sat down for coffee with this mission in mind. To figure it out. To figure out what Moblogging is. And we did. We nailed it. We know. And now I'm going to tell you.

Moblogging is any activity that occurs away from your normal blog-writing place whose purpose is to create content for your blog.

So, when I took pictures of the coffee shop, that was moblogging.

When I wrote this explanation that was not moblogging, since I did it at my desk, fully supported by my normal high-speed net connection, laptop, multi-gigabyte external hard disk, second monitor, USB hub, mouse, etc etc. There were no distractions that come from being in the real world, no toll booths, gas gauges, semi-trailers, weather reports, ticket takers, hot dog vendors, fish throwers, jelly tasters that demand attention above and beyond the blogging I'm doing.

I was moblogging when I crossed the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota, where it's just a slow-flowing creek. If I hadn't taken the pictures and later uploaded them, I still would have been delighted and impressed, but I wouldn't have been moblogging.

When I'm driving through the corn fields of Saskatchewan recording an audio blog post, I am moblogging. Here's a 15-second Quicktime movie that illustrates what it feels like to moblog while driving, from my point of view.

I am also moblogging when I almost drive off the road trying to hit pause on the recording. (In other words moblogging requires new hardware that is designed specifically for moblogging.)

In the future I will be moblogging when I hit the big red Record button on my iPod and talk into it for a half-hour while driving across the wheat fields of Alberta and then hit the big red button again to pause the recording and save it to the internal disk of the iPod. (A low battery also causes it to be saved.) I will be moblogging when I don't drive off the road into one of the wheat fields.

Before we came up with this definition, we were fumbling around trying to figure out if moblogging was more than taking pictures of things with cell phones and having them uploaded to some central server so we could point to them from our blogs. Yes yes, moblogging is more than that, it's a way of blogging, perhaps even a way of living. It's important and fully capable of supporting a 1.5 hour discussion at Bloggercon.

Comment here.