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Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Aug 12, 2005

National

National

Blogging through mobile phones

Karthik Subramanian

MINDBOGGLING: The latest model of an LG digital camera phone. — Photo: Rajeev Bhatt

CHENNAI: An opportunity now for bloggers worldwide to carry their addiction in their pocket. With moblog, short for mobile blog, bloggers, who maintain online diaries, can update their blogs through mobile phones. All they will need is a general pocket radio service handset capable of sending multimedia messages.

Google, which owns the popular Blogger portal, recently launched moblog service for U.S. customers through five mobile service providers. Sify, south India's leading Internet service provider headquartered in Chennai, is beta-testing its moblog service and plans to launch it in a few months.

Over the last four years, blogging has grown from being an online hobby to a social and cultural phenomenon because of its free speech imperative. Moblogs could further enhance the reputation of blogs by making their updates ridiculously easy. Bloggers who capture an interesting photo on their mobile will be able to immediately upload it. Right now, Google has a data limit of 250 kilobytes on any image that can be moblogged. But it has promised to improve on that.

Sify has developed its own software for moblogs. As it exists today, a blogger can only post photos through the mobile phone. Any message or caption will have to be added using a computer. Ajay Nambiar, who works in the consumer channel of the portal, said nearly 15 per cent of all mobile phones in India today had cameras, usually in one mega-pixel range.

To learn more about moblogs, log onto go.blogger.com.

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