Pedro discusses moblogging and asks for ideas (actually he asks for the “ spec of the ultimate moblogging app” - fat chance) ;) for an application.
Well, I’ve always “mobloged”, simply because I’ve had a Palm and GPRS connectivity for over a year and since I’ve always used the weblog’s web interface for managing my weblog and for posting entries this was just a natural thing to do.
So yeah, if you consider posting pictures remotely then it might become a big deal but for standard “text” blogging I don’t get what all the fuss is about.
Apparently people are talking about moblogging but are in fact referring to a specific way of moblogging which is based in MMS or email messages.
Now people get this: moblogging is Mobile Blogging it has no ties whatsoever with the underlying transport mechanism you use to post your stuff.
Having said that and answering Pedro, I don’t have a spec for the ultimate app (far from it) but I do have a couple of ideas:
- Make it as secure as the user wishes: when parsing messages you can either post it immediately, hold it for approval by a moderator, or implement a simple authentication mechanism where the user might be forced to add a line with a username/password pair for the entry to be posted, otherwise it will be added to the moderation queue (this is weak but better than nothing and you can still add things like PGP validation if you are dealing with mail messages). But in the end leave the security model to use up to the user;
- Allow for mixed posts: make it possible to receive and post a message consisting of both pictures and text. Using email for this is trivial, but MMS messages with multi-part content should also be allowed (hell we all know MMS is simply mail in disguise anyway…).
More ideas will come to me in time, no doubt, I’ll track back Pedro’s entry when they do.