Thursday, October 11, 2007

Wireless Blogging

Ok so blogging is pretty much the most self-centred and egotistical form of communication. The blogger can carefully choose his or her words, can choose whether or not to post comments and replies from readers, and can blather on about pretty much anything that he or she believes is interesting to his or herself, notwithstanding the opinions of others.

This blog was intended as a personal test of my comittment to wireless handheld devices as the ultimate means of communication. In reality it has been extraordinarily taxing to make these posts from a keyboard that is not much larger than my two thumbprints held side-by-side. Even more taxing because there is no reasonable way for me to get phone pictures posted to Blogger. There are few readers, really, other than my immediate family members. Even they will find little value here, other than the abbreviated diaries of my sporadic business and road trips. In perusing sparx' blog, it's clear that her content is more interesting to an almost infinitely larger audience, better executed, more frequently and consistently delivered and incorporates feedback religiously, no matter how lame. In fact sparx has marketed her product as effectively as any
good Product Manager would even though she would modestly claim otherwise. She chose a large target market that is consistently growing and refreshing itself (pregnant women and new mothers), kept her product quality high (executed effectively using her innate and considerable writing skills), delivered frequent product updates (writing almost daily), and listened to her market (interacts frequently with her readers, posted feedback and responded to it). So hats off to her for all of this.

I still haven't found a consistent voice, or topic, or energy to post frequently from my phone, and may soon abandon this effort, but until that time, I will endeavour to hone my product, seek an interested target market, and increase production, with sparx as my inspiration.
__________________________________
(sent wirelessly from my phone)
Hoto
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5 comments:

DJ Kirkby said...

I need to learn how to blog wirelessly too. Would save me time in the evenings if I only had to add the missing pics to my posts written in my luch hour!

Sparx said...

oh boo to you, you do so have readers and a great writing voice. You're way way funnier than I am too.

kathryn said...

I came and looked at your blog about a thousand years ago when I worked out that Sparx's 'hoto' was a person and being a people watcher (works much better in restaurants than on blogs...) I used my clever powers of deduction to find your blog. So I came. I freaked out when I saw you did it via, well I'm not actually sure what it is you do it from, and ran for the hills. I'm going to make what might be a very big ASSumption and do you make your mobile phone do these things for you? (insert what the? face) The only thing I've ever found my phone to be really good at is ringing at highly inappropriate times and then hiding from me as I scramble to silence it...

And what do you do about blog hogs that leave comments longer than your original post....?

Point is, I read it.

Hoto said...

DJ: It's easy to post wirelessly from your phone or PDA, since of course any modern phone with a data plan allows you to send email. You configure your Blogger account to allow email posts (if you haven't already) and then put your blog email address into your phone as a "Contact". Then you just, well, send it an email from your phone. If you haven't enabled Email blog posting already, here's how: Login to your Blogger Dashboard. Select the tab titled "Email". Next to your "Mail-to Blogger Address" you can define the specific address to which you want to email your posts. Select "Publish Emails Immediately" and then any email you send to that address will be posted as-is to your blog (The Subject line of your email will be the blog post heading). For example, you could have the email address: dj_kirby.blogpost@blogger.com. Don't give the address out or anyone can post to it. Hope this helps.

Hoto said...

Kathryn: Thanks for stopping by. I have a mobile phone that looks like a Blackberry (but isn't one). It's
this one
. So it has a thumb keyboard that allows you to type emails. I set up Mail-to blogging on Blogger and then I email that address with my postings. When I'm travelling, I can just send the email and have it posted automatically. If I wanted to, however, I could have the posts saved but not actually posted until I got to a computer. For loading pictures, I have to use some software on my my phone called PicoStation which I purchased from an online software store called Handango. However it doesn't work very well. I'm still looking for a better solution. It's only an experiment, however. And since I have very little interesting to say, a rather lonely one. Good luck teaching the wee tackers. Having had the spud to visit recently, I can say that I definitely wouldn't have the patience for it!

Hoto