Learning to Moblog

Ladies and Gentlemen: it is now possible to leap to the forefront of journalism with technology available on the street. This is moblogging. The future is now.
Sort of.
Whoever thought of this was on to something when he or she decided to hire journalism students to use camera phones and the Internet as a nouveau wire service on the cheap. The idea was to be able to capture the ambiance of a political convention by assembling a mosiac of grainy images of the events via the camera phone. The images would give the viewer a near-real-time sense of the convention, taking advantange of the fast upload capabilities of the phone without the need to download images to a computer to edit or send. We would be a swarm of imagetakers and reporters, filing a photo every ten minutes on average, for the entire convention. Our editing team at the University of South Carolina’s Newsplex would edit our pictures and text, and receive dictation for longer stories, and post them to the moblog.

In practice, this operation worked only somewhat. The problems:
Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of interesting items on cellphones and Weblogs:

- The Spokane Spokesman-Review has a new blog by one of the paper’s page designers and his brother (who used to be a Spokesman-Review reporter) chronicling the journey of the Eastern Washington University men’s basketball team to the NCAA tournament. They’re using a Treo 600 cellphone camera to upload photos to the blog, and E-Media Tidbits has an item on their efforts. The Spokane paper previously experimented with moblogging the presidential primary in New Hampshire.

- Nokia is coming out with new software for storing audio, pictures and text collected on a cellphone. It could be a big step toward easy posting of multimedia to a Weblog.

We’ve now posted a bunch of photos to the Presidential Reporting Project Weblog, and they’ve really added a lot to it.

Many of the pictures, such as those by Mark Murrmann, were shot with a digital camera. But the photos Jessica Munoz took at a John Kerry rally – photo 1, photo 2, photo 3 – were taken with her cellphone camera (a Sanyo 3rd generation smart camera phone), and the quality is surprisingly good, especially the closeups. They’re still not as professional looking as those taken with a regular camera, but certainly more than passable.

This lends credence to the idea that if a staff photographer is not available and a reporter doesn’t have a digital camera, taking a picture with a cellphone is worthwhile and does add something to the Weblog.

The other issue is placement of the photos on the blog. Right now the pictures are large, and when you add in all the other elements we’re posting like audio, video clips and text, the blog looks a little jumbled. But I think that also adds some appeal – more of a sense that the coverage is real time and constantly evolving. And it may resonate more with younger readers.

It reminds me of the first time I saw the old Wired magazine – I was repelled by the seemingly chaotic layout and large, gaudy graphics and photos. But that’s precisely what the younger, more hip readership of the magazine liked about it.

Still I think we might want to decrease the size of the photos a little, mainly because they do make it harder to scan through the postings. You have to scroll quite a ways to get past a picture to the accompanying text or to the next posting.

Take a look at how blogger Jeff Jarvis wraps text around an illustration, or how Kevin Sites uses smaller photos so the text and pictures flow together more fluidly.

Here’s an item from Steve Outing on the E-Media Tidbits Weblog about a company that has developed software to help you use a cell phone camera to scan documents. Could be used by a reporter to make copies of documents at a government agency without having to hassle with photocopying, and the scanned images then prsumably could be posted to a Weblog.

One of the main photos The New York Times used with its stories on the bid by Cingular Wireless to take over AT&T Wireless was a picture of the signing of the merger agreement taken with a cell phone – and by a AT&T executive.

As the webmaster here at the J-School, I’ve been looking for the easiest and most effective way to get images off student phones and into the Movable Type system as weblog entries. While there are a number of external services that get the job done if you’re willing to let them host your content, we wanted something we could run on our own web server — our scripts, our backup systems, our customizations.

While I have not yet found the holy grail, I have concluded that mfop2 gets us as close as possible to our goal for now. With mfop2, students email images from their phones to a special address maintained by mfop. We have accounts set up on mfop’s server. When a student emails an image from a phone, they include an ID and password in the message body. The mfop server compares that login data to its database of user accounts and thus knows on which remote server to post the image and blog entry. In the end, both the image and the post itself are stored on our server. mfop merely processes the incoming data.

mfop’s main developer has confirmed for me that it should be possible to make his processing script generic enough to run on any web server, then offer it for download by webmasters. In the meantime, there have been plenty of hints that Movable Type Pro will include moblogging capabilities out of the box. Hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer for that.

Here’s an update on the experiment by the Spokane Spokesman-Review to send a reporter equipped with a cell phone camera to New Hampshire to file stories with pictures to an election Weblog. Mixed results, but instructive.