Mobile Blogging Revisited

A grate. It's basically filler for the entry i will add in a second.

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The Journals team reminded me recently that I haven't talked about moblogging (mobile blogging, or blogging from a mobile device such as a cellphone) in about a year. [Update, 5/31: I added a few corrections based on feedback from Vish on the team, who basically built our mobile blogging feature.]

Plus, they made some changes recently to make moblogging a little easier to find. And to top it off, I now have a cellphone with a camera and a data plan, so I can finally do it myself. So let's take another look at moblogging.

What It's All About
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Moblogging is pretty simple -- at its heart, it's powered by a special e-mail address that you use to post stuff to your blog. So if you have a cellphone that can take pictures and can e-mail them, you've got moblogging.

Are you going to want to write a book this way? Probably not. But if you have some quick thoughts or an interesting photo that you want to share, moblogging is a quick way to do it.

(Bonus: Even if you don't have a cellphone that can take pictures and send e-mail, you can still use your moblogging e-mail address to mail updates to your blog -- and, if you share that address with other people, they can post updates to your blog, too. More on that later.)

[Vish adds: AOL Journals moblogging also supports mobile video uploads from your cell phone -- I haven't tried it myself, yet, but I will have to.]

Now Easier to Find
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First off, it's now easier to find the setup links for moblogging. Previously, it was a little hidden in the "Edit Journal" setting page. Now, it gets its own button, "Go Mobile!" next to the "Add Entry" and "Edit Journal" buttons:

It's also in the footer when you're adding or editing entries:

Actually, clicking the AIM link is something else I need to talk about. So just look at the "your cell phone" part of it now.

No matter how you get there, you'll see this screen here, which gives you your moblogging e-mail address:

The e-mail address, which is "a word, a number and another word"@blogs.aol.com is your Journal's e-mail address -- when you send e-mail to it, it will post to your blog.

You can leave the subject and body fields blank, though your cell phone provider may "help" you out with default text ("You have new Picture Mail") -- you can always edit it later, but you might want to put something in there:

* The subject of the e-mail becomes the title of your entry.
* The body of the message becomes the body of your entry.
* A photo that's attached to the e-mail (not embedded in the body) will be in the post. (Note that you can only have one photo per e-mail. Vish says you can add as many photos as your phone will allow, they'll just display one after another in your entry. Multiple attached photos via regular e-mail may not work, depending on what your e-mail software does to multiple attachments.)

If you want to change your blog's e-mail address (like you gave the address to someone and you don't want them to be able to post to your blog anymore), click the hyperlink that says "Get a new e-mail address." When you do this, you'll get a new address, and the old one will stop working.

What else?

* Moblogging is free on the AOL side, though you'll need to check to see if your cell phone company charges for data uploading.
* You'll want to add your moblogging address to your phone's address book, or else you'll have to remember and retype it every time you want to post.
* Once you've made a posting, you can go back and editit from your computer, just like any other blog entry.
* Like I said, if you share your Journal's e-mail address with other people, they'll be able to post to your blog by sending e-mail to that address. And it'll appear to come from the screen name of the blog owner. So be careful with that (and if you do share your posting address, ask your contributors to sign their entries so you'll know who posted what).

That's pretty much it.

Now, I'm kind of a control freak when it comes to blogging -- I like editing my photos, as well as laying out my text just so. Also, I'm not that fast when it comes to texting on a cell phone keypad. So I'm not sure how often I'll be moblogging. It's something I'll have to work on.

Thanks --Joe

Tags: aol journals, moblogging, mobile blogging