Moblogging News

Moblogging is proving to be a notable medium with some interesting developments.

Boing Boing reports that google indexed photos of iraqi prisoner abuse that were recieved from a photosharing site. Smugmug.com appears to be the source of the pictures and it is understood that the user was a woman whose husband had brought them back after his tour of duty. A Spanish news paper 'El Mundo' has published some of the pictures which can be found here

The authenticity of the pictures has yet to be established but the story brings light to the potential power of moblogging. Historically newspapers / media agencies usually provide better coverage of such stories by purchasing pictures / key facts and getting their agents there first.
This story has shown how news could start at moblogging sites with pictures of key events from its users who are there with their camera phones when it happens. The BBC published an article in November here discussing the potential of camera phones capturing unexpected events. The article also mentions the process of how a picture of the body of Theo van Gogh the controversial Dutch film maker made it to a newspaper after he was killed..

The suitable titles of 'open-source news' or 'moblog journalism' has been awarded to this type of content and it also made an impact at the recent US elections.
I can certainly see a time where we will be looking at moblogging sites first for event based news. The effectiveness of such sites would be based on their ability to be independant of propaganda as this would be an excellent tool for such an activity.

picturephoning.com also talk about how the average joe can become a freelance journalist for cash when they catch lucrative pictures of celebrities.

MSN has just released its new blogging service known as MSN Spaces.The service had been running in Japan initially and Phil Ringnalda gave it a thorough going over back then.The outcome wasnt particularly encouraging in terms of technical competance and after abit of playing there is obviously alot of room for improvement.

Msn Spaces is the biggest player to move into the mobile blogging market.

First impressions:

- The speed of the site isnt too quick
- The basic interface is the usual msn look and feel
- Some bloggers have managed to customise their blogs quite highly
- All of the technical features (track back, comments etc) seem to be available.

Features:
As with all msn services you login via your .net passport account.
From a usability point of view its fairly straight forward although I suspect that first time bloggers may struggle in places.

My main problems in performing basic tasks such as creating a blog with pictures was I couldnt. To upload photos you need to install an activex program, the network was being upgraded when I attempted it for the first time, so no pictures.

10 Minutes later and I have managed to publish my msn spaces blog with a picture.

A drag and drop set of features allow you to customise your pages within your space by moving the blog components to where you want them. MSN offers 15 backgrounds and five layout templates to make things look a little different.

In conclusion the service is still in beta and will be experiencing a high load with its recent launch. The market for blogging looks set to continue to be competitive and an area of growth. MSN's first service isnt as good as other implementations around but Microsoft have a knack for persistance. Becoming a blogging heavy weight is going to require lots of innovation and originality. Msn has made headway by introducing features like music lists and photo albums - These are things that appeal to normal users.

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