HP mpulse Article on Moblogging

m-pulse / a cooltown magazine / Blogging Goes Mobile

Amy Cowen wrote a great article on moblogging for the August 2003 issue of mpulse, the HP Labs cooltown magazine. I remember reading about cooltown a few years ago when HP first announced the initiative. As the economy turned down and out, I had assumed that funding for cooltown would’ve been one of the first things HP would cut. I’m glad to see they have maintained what appears to be a decent level of funding for interesting research in mobile computing.

“For several years, HP Labs has been working at the intersection of nomadicity, appliances, networking, and the web. We called our vision of the future cooltown – a vision of a technology future where people, places, and things are first class citizens of the connected world, wired and wireless…”

The article provides a very nice overview of moblogging and of some of the available tools. It gets fuzzy only when she delves into APIs and syndication formats, first referring to “XML-RPC and RCC” and then implying that the “new specification codenamed Echo” would not use “XML and RSS underpinnings for blogs”. Echo might not be based directly on RSS, but it will definitely be XML-based. I’ll cut her some slack, though, since the rest of the article is quite good and trying to summarize the current API and syndication format drama in a single paragraph is a challenge that I wouldn’t want to take on.

In the section on the moblogging community, Amy wrote a bit about my PhoneBlogger tool.

“For example, the developer of PhoneBlogger, an opensource VoiceXML project that allows users to post voice entries to their blogs, blogged the following after learning about LISTENLAB’s audblog: ‘if you are willing to get your hands filthy with electrons, want total control over the blogging tool, and have plenty of free time to spare, let me know and I will help set you up.’ This kind of techno, hands-on approach is a hallmark of the developer community, and its extension into blogging circles gives the blogging community an almost grassroots edge.”

I’m starting to feel kind of bad about doing virtually no development on PhoneBlogger since I released the source code many months ago. I think this is the motivation I needed to get back into the code, add some new features, and simplify the install. Hey, I’ve got to live up to my newfound status of behaving like “a hallmark of the developer community”, as opposed to my usual behavior as a hallmark card for the slacker community.