Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Blogging With Camera Phones 155

Posted by timothy from the just-a-dollar-an-entry dept.
Zastrossi writes "The Register reports that NewBay Software, "is to offer software to mobile operators that will enable mobile phone users to create and maintain Weblogs or 'blogs' using only their phones." Sounds like a pretty sound idea, particularly in that they're selling to the telcos as opposed to consumers. SMS was one revenue source for mobile providers, will camera phones become another?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Blogging With Camera Phones More

Blogging With Camera Phones

Comments Filter:
  • But the whole blog thing is starting to get boring.

  • /. phones? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jpetts ( 208163 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:46PM (#5042607)
    Surely it'll be pretty damn' easy to /. a mobile phone? Multiprocessor Nokias, anybody???

  • Text entry? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by guido1 ( 108876 )
    So do they have a workaround for the tiny "keyboards" that cell phones have? Seems like this would only work for an image-only blog.

    • Re:Text entry? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by KDan ( 90353 )
      That would be a really cool idea actually... A sort of multimedia blog.

      Imagine you go on holiday, you have your mobile phone with you. Every time you see something cool (let's hope you have good taste), you use your camera phone to take a picture of it and speak in a short message to attach to the picture. With some sort of text-to-speech package that would be very cool. Then instead of sending a post card back, you send the url of the blog which is automatically created from this, and your friends can follow your holidays and feel a bit sunny in sympathy.

      That's actually something which people might pay for. The holiday use is only one, what about integrating this idea into a sort of community... everyone in the community (say of friends from univ) keeps a sort of multimedia blog from their phone, sharing things that they're doing to maintain the group bonding, etc... I know I would pay good money to keep in touch like that with my friends from uni.

      Damn, the uses are practically infinite... Anyone else feel that this could be a killer app for 3G phones?

      Daniel

      • Re:Text entry? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by filth grinder ( 577043 )
        It's already out there. Check out Hiptop Nation [bedope.com]. It's a blogging from camera phones site. It's for use with the T Mobile Sidekick [amazon.com] but looks prety interesting.

        Could be pretty cool.
        • Sure, but that's not it yet, by far. What I meant was some sort of centralised service for this, that works regardless of which network you're on, and that concentrates on the community idea, the idea that you use these "blogs" not to show pretty pictures to complete strangers, but to stay in touch with friends.

          It might be just my personal opinion but frankly blogs for complete strangers are a bit of a waste of time... from the visitor's side, a kind of symptom of some sort of strange sort of voyeurism, and from the creator's side another expression of that symptom through the willingness to be looked at by complete strangers, to disclose your personality to any and all... and to provide a beautiful tool for any organisation that wants to to profile you and put you in a database if they decide you're dangerous.

          A multimedia blog orientated more towards community building, towards maintaining a real-life community's contacts when they are split up by circumstances (such as finishing uni) seems (to my humble self) to be a more useful idea. Shame we'll probably have to wait 10-20 years before it is implemented properly in a seamless way that allows it to be used by joe average.

          Daniel
        • My phone supports e-mail as it is and it's not very difficult to whip up a script to do that. I already have my phone configured to receive messages from my web site, so setting something up to poll a e-mail address isn't too difficult.

    • Re:Text entry? (Score:2, Informative)

      by knuurius ( 307631 )

      Ericsson released the Chatboard [sonyericsson.com] for their mobile phones if you prefer a QUERTY Keyboard.

      All mobile phones I bought the last 3 years came with T9 Text Input [t9.com]. Don't know about phones in the USA, but here in Europe, most people I know use this system on their phones. They come with a built in dictionary, so you only have to press one button per character and it knows, which word you want to type. If there are several possibilities, you can choose the right one. It's much faster than the "normal" way to type text messages and you can even add new (swear)words to the dictionary ;)


      -------- Create your your personal color combination and see if people like it or not: colorcell.org

    • And I'm surprised that it hasn't been a /. feature yet.

      http://www.iptel-now.de/HOWTO/CHATBOARD/chatboar d. html
    • Predictive text with a T9 dictionary on my Nokia works fine for me. My website's guestbook is accessible via the web or WAP on a mobile phone. You can sign or browse my guestbook [sorn.net] on a mobile phone. One key for each letter in a word, with a smaller area for your fingers to cover isn't that bad really - unless you have larger fingers than Nokia considers to be 'normal'.

  • My blog goes like this... (Score:5, Funny)

    by stephenisu ( 580105 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:47PM (#5042616)
    Monday see the 3 gray walls around me... Tuesday see the 3 gray walls around me... Wednsday see the 3 gray walls around me... Thursday see the 3 gray walls around me... Friday see the 3 gray walls around me... Saturday see 4 white walls around me... Sunday see 4 white walls around me...
  • One of the things that I love about my Palm and has made it into something I couldn't live without it my fold-up stowaway keyboard. Fast text entry is very important. I don't want to have to press the numeric keypad to enter text. Period.

    Will these phones have a keyboard attachment?
  • Have you ever looked at the per-meg charge for cell phones? This would become very expensive, very quickly.
    • Like $10/unlimited for Sprint PCS Vision?
      • I had not seen an unlimited plan for data yet. That is pretty cool though if it costs only that much.

        • Re:Expensive (Score:3, Informative)

          by mph ( 7675 )
          Technically, the terms of service for $10/unlimited Vision only allow you to send/receive data on the phone itself, not to use it with your laptop, PDA, etc. However, many people are reporting that this limitation is not being enforced, and that they'll probably only be looking for the egregious offenders who consistently use their cell phone in place of a dialup or broadband connection. In any case, this article was talking about a service accessed on the phone itself, so that would definitely fall under the $10/unlimited plan.
    • Orange UK offer 10 meg transfer rate over GPRS for 4 GBP per month. After that, they offer the service in bundles of 0.5meg, with the cost decreasing per Mb as you purchase more.

      It's ideal for using over the mobile phone, ie, to check email and news updates, but would soon mount up if connected to a laptop/PDA via bluetooth.

      Tim

      • Ah, someone with very similar interests to me: "Punk rock, web development, computer building, Unreal Tournament.", and only at the other end of the M8 ;-)

        I use orange GRPS too - it's great. I've had WAP on an Orange phone since they introduced the Nokia 7110. I'm now on a Nokia 6310.

  • Camera phones (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Will camera phones become another source of revenue, like SMS? The only incentive that ever existed for telcos to launch camera phones was that they can make more revenue.

  • Yuck (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crumbz ( 41803 ) <<remove_spam>jus ... o spam>gmail,com> on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:48PM (#5042628) Homepage
    Sounds like a waste of time. Blogging with your phone will only result in mis-typed entries with poorly lit, poorly framed and blurry photos of famous landmarks that you can't quite make out and the result looks kind of like New Jersey or unrecognizable people who aren't particularly attractive or even remotely intersting even if drugs and/or alcohol were involved at 3:22AM when they were filmed on the way to yet another bar or club overcharging due to the lateness of the hour or the so called exclusivity of the place. Eck.
    • bad input system + bad camera + bad connection + expensive phone = good?

      Somebody tell me who's making the decisions at the telecom industry. Do they read slashdot?

      Next fiasco. This one is easy.

      • Re:bad+bad=good? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Xerithane ( 13482 )
        bad input system + bad camera + bad connection + expensive phone = good?

        T9 isn't a bad input system. I use it often, and it works just fine. Sure, it's not as fast as a full keyboard, but it's not a hard system to learn.

        If the cameras are anything like what they have in Japan, they won't be bad cameras. The pictures are a bit small (320x200 I think) but they look pretty crisp. Connections aren't that bad, in the US I have an ATT GSM phone and it's bandwidth rates are not that horrible. 19.2kbps at the moment, so uploading a couple pictures and some text will take what.. 10 seconds at most?

        Somebody tell me who's making the decisions at the telecom industry. Do they read slashdot?
        Sorry to tell you this, but the telecom industry doesn't care about a handful of geeks that think they know what the revolution in mobile communication is. I'd say it's pretty safe that they know much more about the market than anyone else here.

        • Sorry to tell you this, but the telecom industry doesn't care about a handful of geeks that think they know what the revolution in mobile communication is. I'd say it's pretty safe that they know much more about the market than anyone else here.

          Which would be why telecoms companies have been doing so well recently, right...?

          Telecom companies have no clue what is going to be the next hit. GSM, SMS and i-mode were surprise successes; IDSN, WAP and 3G have been disastrous failures. The companies are to some degree aware of this, and they hire legions of geeks to help them forecast the future, but often greed takes over -- and sometimes the geeks are just wrong. (For instance, I guessed right on the failure of 3G and WAP, and I'm pretty sure GPRS and MMS will take off, but if you'd followed my advice and dumped Nokia stock for SonyEricsson you would have regretted it.)

          Cheers,
          -j. (a geek in telecoms)

          • Which would be why telecoms companies have been doing so well recently, right...?

            Sorry to inform you, but the wireless carriers are doing good. Or did you think they can hire Jamie Lee Curtis and Katherine Zeta Jones and not do good?

            Telecom companies have no clue what is going to be the next hit. GSM, SMS and i-mode were surprise successes; IDSN, WAP and 3G have been disastrous failures. The companies are to some degree aware of this, and they hire legions of geeks to help them forecast the future, but often greed takes over -- and sometimes the geeks are just wrong. (For instance, I guessed right on the failure of 3G and WAP, and I'm pretty sure GPRS and MMS will take off, but if you'd followed my advice and dumped Nokia stock for SonyEricsson you would have regretted it.)

            Sorry, but you just completely and totally discredited yourself. First, name one full 3G network in the US. Second, WAP sucks, outside of the US And inside. Third, Only the US is having any problems getting their networks up. This is because there is too much competition.

            Do you even know what 3G is? How can you say GPRS and MMS will take off but 3G is a failure? My guess is you don't have a flying fuck of a clue. No offense, but your entire post sounds like you are a janitor trying to speak on behalf of the tech department. I'm not in the wireless world, but I know that most of what you said is wrong.

    • Re:Yuck (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jester99 ( 23135 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @06:52PM (#5043691) Homepage
      Sounds like a waste of time. Blogging with your phone will only result in mis-typed entries with poorly lit, poorly framed and blurry photos of famous landmarks that you can't quite make out. ...And SMS text messages just result in slowly-entered, oft-mistyped messages that could have been communicated more accurately in about 1/3 the total time, if only some sort of speech telecommunication device were available to the user (heh), but for whatever reason, SMS's sell like hotcakes.

      To a computer nerd (I take the liberty of assuming) like yourself, phone blogging sounds a) impractical, b) a step backwards, and/or c) utterly useless. But to a 16 year old girl, it merely sounds "cool."

      And cool makes the phone companies money, cuz there's many more 16 year old girls with cell phones than there are people such as yourself.

  • Incredible! (Score:4, Funny)

    by goldspider ( 445116 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:48PM (#5042633) Homepage
    "...is to offer software to mobile operators that will enable mobile phone users to create and maintain Weblogs or 'blogs' using only their phones."

    What's next? Being able to create and maintain Weblogs from computers?? What an incredible age we live in!

  • Imagine Slashdot on a camera phone... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:48PM (#5042638) Homepage Journal
    Now the CowboyNeil option will come with a picture. The HORROR! THE HORROR!

  • Killer App? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Giant Ape Skeleton ( 638834 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:49PM (#5042646) Homepage
    Perhaps this is the convergence of three trends:
    The camgirl/guy, IM, and the Blog.
    Mmmm....mobile camgirl diaries..... :-P

    -----------

  • If only somebody can invent ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:50PM (#5042653)
    If only somebody can invent software that would make the random writings/thoughts of millions of nitwits worth reading.

    THAT would be a blog revolution, my friends.

  • At first I thought, "Phoneblogs, what a stupid idea because those phone keypads are a bitch to type on!" Then I thought, "What if they're using a speech to text engine?"

    After reading through the site and finding out there is no voice to text, I verified my original thought, "Phoneblogs, what a stupid idea"

    Maybe I shouldn't crap on it too much though, it's still in it's infancy and *could* be cool, But how many journalist do you know that crank out stories on a 12 key keyboard? Didn't think so.
    • Couldnt the phone just have a 'recorder' function, so people can dictate the infuriatingly boring minutia of their everyday lives, and then post it when they get home?

      I mean, does the world really need to know about the "bagel you had for breakfast that might have been a bit stale" right then and there?
  • I'll bet all 7 people in the target demographic snap this one up like hotcakes...
    • hm?

      there's awful lot of teens that think they're intresting.

      there's awful lot of teens that are fast typing on ~12button phone.

      there's awful lot of teens that would spend some minisculent amount of money for this, like the price of 1 txt msg here and then.

      reading the replys here looks like that the usa is still in some stone-age in mobile phones and especially sms msg's. except to start seeing chatshows on nightly tv.. with 1 msg costing little under 1 dollar! and the lag getting your message on screen being sometimes over one hour! the lag being because so many people wanting to say Hi to the world or making ass of them or saying their soccer team RulZ..

  • Blog? Blah! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by core plexus ( 599119 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:52PM (#5042672) Homepage
    Is anyone else getting tired of these "blogs"? Why the need to post the minutiae of every little brain fart? Don't believe that's what it is? Check this [google.com] out.

    Admittedly, there may be 10 or less that are worthy of a visit, or can justify their reason to be, but far more often than not, I don't see the point. "Everyone Can Be A Publisher", but I question, Should They?

    Over-exposed schoolgirl victim of high-tech bullying [xnewswire.com]

    • The irony of you, a dedicated reader and comment contributor to the Slashdot.org technology blog, taking a few minutes of your spare time to make fun of people who post their opinions, experiences, and journals online for others to read is mind boggling.

      I don't mean to offend you per se, but just to urge you to step out of your own shoes for a second and realize that you're only criticizing yourself when you put down those who have personal Web sites.

    • Re:Blog? Blah! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by PD ( 9577 )
      I have a blog (down right now because my DirectTV DSL is fubar, and the new one isn't hooked up yet). I write it for ME, not YOU.

      If you read it, fine, but I don't care. Basically it's written by me, for me, for my own use. Besides the stupid details of my life, I also sometimes put programming notes that I don't want to forget or lose, but always want access to. The web is perfect for that.

      Even better, my grandkids will have absolute proof that their granddad was a boring old fuck. And in 50 years I'll be able to read about all the crap I did to waste 50 years of my life.
    • The name of the author escapes me at the moment, but I remember a good quote: "Most of us are born with at least one novel in us. Most of us, fortunately, are also kind enough to keep it locked up under skull arrest."

      Yeah, some blogs are tiresome, but I will defend to the death the right for blogs to exist. We need these things, man. Its part of that whole Internet thing. Just because you're tired of the word 'blog', or have read the wrong blogs, doesn't mean the entire concept is without merit. Besides, look where you are.

      I've seen numerous instances of blogs from war-torn countries providing the only legitimate news to relatives and friends living far away.

      • You both have valid, and excellent points. They basically support what I was saying: Have a 'blog', and enjoy yourself. But please, seek quality over quantity. I also did not say all blogs are bad, in fact I said there are 10 (at least) that are exemplary. There may be many more, and many of them, as you both have pointed out, serve a function that is important to a narrow readership. So, if I don't care to stop by and read it, don't get pissed at me. But I'd point out this: If people begin to transmit every little momentary "Ah-Ha!" to a 'blog', then where are we going? Remember when you had to ruminate on a thought, and it grew and expanded in your head? And then finally, like relieving yourself after a long holding, it flowed so nice and freely? At least that is how it is with me. Even then, if it is important, I'll wallow in it for a day or two, or put it aside ahile and review it days later.

        At least it is a clever marketing ploy on the cell phone companys' part to sell more airtime to subscribers.

        I did not intend for my post to sound negative.

        • Sorry, didn't mean to sound pissed. I agree, and it is a clever ploy.

          Your thought:

          Remember when you had to ruminate on a thought, and it grew and expanded in your head? And then finally, like relieving yourself after a long holding, it flowed so nice and freely?

          ... is a very interesting point. One the one hand, I could easily see how this might 'stunt' and idea, because there is a sort of cathartic release when you transmute your thoughts into a written medium. On the other hand, I've often been inspired by long-lost thoughts I had while keeping a journal ?thoughts that would have vanished otherwise.

          Of course, cell phone companies could give a damn, you're right about that. Cheers.

    • The same applies the the web as a whole. When you think about it, there's a hell of a lot of crap on here. But you aren't looking at the whole lot, you only care about your specific bits of it.

      Likewise with blogs. Nobody reads them all. People read the ones that are interesting to them.

    • Why not? Yeah, I prefer quality stuff, but everyone's got different ideas about what is quality stuff. One of the cool things about the web is how much stuff is out there for any particular taste. But this doesn't happen if we discourage people by making remarks intended to curtail the production of that content. We should encourage more web-posting of stuff, the farther out there the better, imho. If people go around thinking "well, I'm not worthy" then we're going to get stuck with whatever Big Media wants us to see.

    • Re:Blog? Blah! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by zmooc ( 33175 )
      So you're complaining on slashdot that you get tired of blogs? Slashdot is just about that and you read that, obviously. I've read many interesting weblogs; I just don't read the bad ones. What you are doing is like searching for my-first-homepage frontpage-creations without any usefull content and then complaining that you get tired of homepages. Check this [yahoo.com] out. Or do you also question "Everyone Can Ignore Other People's Publications"? An incredible amount of crap can be found in any medium. It's called having a choice.

  • Forget the blogging... (Score:5, Funny)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:53PM (#5042689) Journal
    I only use my sanyo-5300 so I can remember hot women the next day... since I tend to drink a bit on the heavy side whilst I'm out about town. :)
  • I don't know whether "moblogging" will take off or not, but I'm sure telcos will make no money from it, because blogging does not require any help from the network. Blogging is like wi-fi: it's a product, not a service [shirky.com], so people aren't going to pay service fees for it.

  • Not that scores of people are doing this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheKodiak ( 79167 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:54PM (#5042705) Homepage
    Not that scores of people are doing this already using the Danger Sidekick, or anything.

  • Privacy Issues and White Noise ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HealYourChurchWebSit ( 615198 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:55PM (#5042710) Homepage


    The law may have changed, but when I lived in NYC, people had to get permission to use your image if they were shooting film or taking photos for publication. I wonder how blogging one's picture phone will play into such privacy issues?

    That said, I could see how this would be useful, or at least interesting when a news story breaks, e.g. train derailment, so we can all glare at the dead bodys instead of waiting until we get home to watch the cable news.

    My worst fear ... bandwidth consumed to web phone pix of cats ...

    • in most states, you can broadcast video of anything in public and usually in the privacy of your home. When you add sound to the mix, it often becomes illegal (the laws were written for phone taps and 'bugs' that record only sound).

      Making a law that requires permission from anyone in a video in public would kill news broadcasts "from the street" because you could not get permission from everyone walking or driving behind the newscaster.

      There was a lawsuit recently by a man who was told by his friends that nude video of him was for sale on a gay porn site. The man had been a wrestler in college and during a meet in Michigan (I think), someone had set up hidden cameras in the locker room and filmed the guys getting dressed and undressed. Not only did the law permit this and prevent the unsuspecting men from stopping the sales of the tape, it did not require those making money from it to give any royalties to the 'stars', either.
  • Do we really NEED more Blogs?

    The people who make this software should look into their hearts and consider this question before unleashing it on the world

  • Bloggin (Score:4, Funny)

    by Amsterdam Vallon ( 639622 ) <amsterdamvallon2003@yahoo.com> on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @03:55PM (#5042715) Homepage
    Anyone else feel that there's probably a direct relation between the growing popularity of blogging and the growing number of unemployed IT workers?
  • What the hell is so interesting in your life that you can't wait till you get to a computer to update your BLOG?

    Do you really think other people are actually reading it?

    Those hits on your counter are your friends and family and the 15 million you bumped it up to initially to make yourself feel important.

    Frankly there is just to much "look at me, I've got something to say" these days...

    (Please note that I appreciate replies as I feel my contributions here are worth something.)

  • What's the deal with these? I mean Christ, people are acting like it's the first time that people are keeping a journal of their daily activities on the Internet. I don't quite understand why this has become the "new hotness."
  • Another service for cellcos to dance out to make you ignore that you cant get a bleedin phone call on your cell to go through. I know I'm excited.
  • More interesting people would blog. I would probably read the blogs of Linus Torvalds or Stephen Hawking or George Dubya or AlGore, famous important people and such.

    I have no interest in what Pete Johnson from Mahwah NJ thought of while on the city bus on his way to the free clinic (sorry pete, but I really dont).

    However I think the people that I would want to read the blogs of probably are too busy with something else to be blogging. Maybe theres a connection there. Maybe bloggers have the time to blog because their life is boring to start with anyways. Thats not just a troll/flamebait, I dont blog but I might as well with all the comments I have posted here on /.

  • Already done it (Score:5, Informative)

    by Uhh_Duh ( 125375 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @04:06PM (#5042804) Homepage
    I wrote a quick perl script to do this for a friend who has a camera phone.

    It picks up the incoming mail via a sendmail pipe (in /etc/aliases) which routes it to a perl script which parses out the email content and attachments (pictures from the phone) and posts them to a MySQL database. The front-end of the project involved CGI scripts that would talk to the MySQL database and display the data to the web.

    Result? Real-time blogging from the camera with pictures and text! Total lines of code? Less than 100.
  • What the phones really need is good voice-recognition software, so the blogger can just start babbling and the results will be instantly posted.

    "Wait, did I say 'Thursday'? I meant 'Friday'! No, wait - don't record that. Don't post this. Are you still posting?? Stop!!"

    Soon, every conversation ever held could be blogged for all to see. Just what the world needs. More mental diarrhea.
  • It is estimated that over 500,000 have been created over the past 18 months and are now starting up at the rate of about 5,000 daily.

    And are receiving their last post ever at the rate of about 7,000 daily.

  • I don't know (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CaptainZapp ( 182233 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @04:09PM (#5042839) Homepage
    SMS was one revenue source for mobile providers, will camera phones become another?

    ...if camera phones will become the next direly awaited revenue source for the carriers, but there's one significant difference in those "products":

    GSM [gsmworld.com] was really, really smart engineering, which took off because the various stakeholders (wireless carriers, handset manufacturers, network equipment providers) pooled their resources and ideas and achieved a great standard which served everybody (even, if not most the users).

    SMS was actually a byproduct of that standard and nobody had an idea how much it would take off. It's immensly successful and a nice source of additional revenue for the carriers.

    Camera phones however seems more to be a product of marketing cree^H^H^H^Hexperts in the sense that they try to create a need, which otherwise doesn't exist.

    Of course every industry player is very interested in multimedia messaging to succeed. The manufacturers like to sell new, snazzy and expensive phones, carriers charge an arm and a leg and have a huge interest in mms taking off and network equipment providers can sell nice upgrades to the wireless infrastructure.

    Now if the consumers play nice, or if this is another wap fiasko in the making only time will tell.

    • Camera phones = worthless. Get a cheap-ass digital camera, for God's sakes!
    • Of course every industry player is very interested in multimedia messaging to succeed. The manufacturers like to sell new, snazzy and expensive phones, carriers charge an arm and a leg and have a huge interest in mms taking off and network equipment providers can sell nice upgrades to the wireless infrastructure.

      Now if the consumers play nice, or if this is another wap fiasko in the making only time will tell.

      Picture messages have been a huge hit in Japan, J-Phone [j-phone.com] alone has picked up over 5 million subscribers for its Sha-Mail service in the last year and doubled its data ARPU in the process (translation: the service is actually used and the operator is making a killing in per-byte fees).

      The business model is clearly viable. It remains to be seen if GSM operators kill the golden goose by overcharging for messages, but rates seem to be becoming more reasonable and things are looking pretty good.

      Cheers,
      -j.

  • I set up something like this.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by rasjani ( 97395 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @04:10PM (#5042840) Homepage
    Friend of my from workplace bought nokia phone with digicam stuff. It seems that this phone can send those images as email to someone.. Well, i set his (hosted) unix box in a way that when ever it receives email from the phone, all attached jpg's will get saved to a web folder..

    That folder has some php gallery code and everything runs smoothly.

    I didnt really need anything fancy to acomplish this.. ripmime, procmail and and that phpslideshow i downloaded from freshmeat.

    I guess i could set him up with "blogging" options too so that he can send email containing just text too so that his blog would get updated too.

    Not *that* big deal you know ...

  • ... but not the way they say to do it.

    Here's what you do:

    - get a Bluetooth phone
    - get a Bluetooth-capable computer or adapter
    - write blog on computer
    - take pictures with fancy, real digital camera
    - upload
    - uh, profit?

  • In a couple years we'll be seeing the same this with video portable devices.

  • Blogging? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Wind_Walker ( 83965 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @04:13PM (#5042863) Homepage Journal
    How about, instead of blogging with it, you make like the Japanese and bully schoolmates with it! [mainichi.co.jp]. Apparently some ticked-off classmate took a picture of a (rather attractive) girl in his class and forwarded it to his friends, along with some rather nasty information including her name and her... promiscuous behavior.

    And don't forget this gem [mainichi.co.jp] regarding voyeurism with cell phones. My favorite quote?

    The girl was alerted to his presence by the noise emitted by the phone camera's shutter. She turned around to catch Hamano with his hands between her legs

    • Re:Blogging? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The girl was alerted to his presence by the noise emitted by the phone camera's shutter. She turned around to catch Hamano with his hands between her legs.

      As mobile phone cameras are exclusively digital, there is no "shutter" to be heard.

      At least the Nokia 7650 [nokia.com] has an option that when enabled will play a sound sample that sounds like a traditional shutter/film camera taking a picture.

      When playing Peeping Tom, you'll have to be really stupid to leave that sound option enabled!

    • Aieeeeee! Click on the "wai wai" section and assuming all these stories were true and for real, you will realize that japanese are really hentai just like hentai manga! SCARY!
  • Many people in their 20s find cell phone instant message to be very tedious with no keyboard.

    On the other hand, the youths of Japan/Asia, and Europe are having a blast with cell phones and instant messaging.

    Damn, I feel old.
    • I know what you mean. A buddy of mine got text messaging on his newest ***bling bling*** phone. Total number of text messages he got:
      0
      Maybe it has something to do with all of us having different providers or that the systems are incompatible. I really don't know. What I do know is typing something like this small post would take too long on a phone.
      In fact, I still remember those commercials(was it M Life) that said the new language was stuff like IMG8=I am great or something like that. Whatever.
      Theory Follows...
      I always hear how in other countries, you see people text messaging each other as they are riding in a trian/bus/public transportation. Now, as we all know, in the US, public transportation isn't used as much as it is elsewhere. Could this be a factor?
  • I'd do a seperate blog from my cell that only includes important info about dropped phone calls, delayed text messages etc.

    I wouldn't even have to include all the info for phone calls cuz I could compare the blog entry to my phone bill.

    I would then have a nice comprehensive list of things I can complain about.

    Now if the companies actually paid attention to complaints and did things that go towards progress, I might even end up with less negative entries and more blog entries that indicate "Great Reception @ somewhere!" or "Fastest Sports Alert Ever!"

    Of course, the geeky thing would be to not even consider paying for such a blog-type service.

    All I'd have to do is write one or two perl scripts and do some procmail tinkering.

    I already have my cell phone / procmail setup to feed me certain useful info from websites or to check if i have important email that I need to look at. Why would I even want to pay for web access through my cell phone? That's what a computer is for. I'm never in THAT much of a hurry.

    I'm just glad I have unlimited text messaging.
  • <plug> Incidentally (and at the risk of getting /.'d) I run a WebLog that allows anyone to contribute by text. Going for over a year now. http://weblog.vanhegan.net [vanhegan.net] </plug>

  • More mobile phone safety (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great. So now instead of just TALKING on their cell phones while their driving, people can actually update their blog! No sir. No danger here.
  • I wrote my own skinnable website package which includes multi-blog functionality with all the usual features. A few months ago I added a wireless skin (WML) and can now post to my blog and change my mood from my cell phone. While I don't often post to my blog via the phone, I do have a private blog section that I post to sometimes. It's basically a "note to self" type thing and it's very handy typing a quick idea here and there via my cell phone. It saves carrying around a PDA a lot of the time.

    And yeah, blogs are lame and boring and all that, but they're damn handy to remember what on earth I did yesterday.
  • Seems like a cool idea, but my method is so much easier. I own a Sony Ericsson T68i and a Sony Clie NX70V. Together they make a great pair. I use the Clie to write messages, email, take pictures, and then use the T68i to send them to friends, or to a website. I haven't really done much blogging with the devices, but it would be relatively easy with the built in keyboard on the Clie.

    Hopefully sometime soon Sony will get off their butt and release the Bluetooth Memory Stick for my Clie here in the US so I don't have to use IR to send with my T68i.
  • This actually could have some practical use as well...imagine being stuck inside a building during a collapse. With a camera phone, the rescue worker could take pictures of herself masturbating, and upload them to the Internet. You'd be saved!
  • Most of the people I know with phone-camera thingo's are using them most to send pictures of their various dangly bits. Like the telephone, 8mm film, video, broadband Internet, DVD and so on, new tech is likely to be boosted significantly by those seeking/sending pr0n.

    "Yo, I'm texting with one hand, baby!!!! See!??!!" :)
  • Considering that most phones (picture phones or no) only have the phone keypad as a keyboard for entering anything, I guess we get to really see if a picture is worth a thousand words :-)

    Then again, there's always the SMS extreme shorthand for captions...
  • the submitter writes "SMS was one revenue source for mobile providers, will camera phones become another?" Probably, but they wont get my money for one until i get usable photos, plus i'm picky and want several devices in one, like GPS, moblie phone, PDA, mp3 player, FRS/GMRS radio, AM/FM radio, and so on, if i can have one device to drag around then I'll buy a computer smaller than a laptop.
  • I setup a website to play with this idea Clunky.net [clunky.net] but I don't have the time to maintain it at the moment. May resurrect it if it becomes popular..

  • Danger Hiptop (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Danger Hiptop aka T-Mobile Sidekick has a built in camera and qwerty style keyboard. Even before the phone hit the streets, people had 'photo blogs' set up. Typically, the user takes a picture, attaches it to an email with the blog entry in the body of the email and sends it to a special email address that is site specific.

    More can be found out about the Danger Hiptop at;
    http://www.danger.com/products.php

    or;
    http://www.t-mobile.com/products/overview.a sp?phon eid=165302

    and a photoblog may be found at;
    http://www.hiptop.bedope.com

  • sharing perspectives (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mike_e_d ( 540041 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2003 @04:51PM (#5043126)
    I don't understand the hatred of blogs that seems so widespread here. Some are good, some are bad, but none of them force you to read them. A good blogger writing about a trip to the grocery store can be really entertaining or enlightening. It's all about the quality of the work and how well it resonates with you. I think it's really amazing that people are willing to offer up there perspective and experience to the world for free. And the camera idea is a really great way to very literally let someone "see the world through your eyes." --mike d
  • To see this concept already in action visit Hiptop Nation [bedope.com].
  • And it seems we'll have the full blown version of it very soon. The book describes people who live "a recorded life" where every action they do is recorded via wireless camera on their watch...
  • ...or crappy photos, whichever.

    Actually, I noticed that article this morning and immediately fast-forwarded the idea 5-10+years into future. Imagine when technology makes it very easy to capture details about a subject and using an intelligent filtering agent enter it into a /. type info stream that's scrubbed and broadcast to consumers based on their tastes. maybe you want to see/hear/read about every bit of info that happens about X...

    Blogging is stupid and very self-indulgent at this point, but imagine if someone were to commercialize the process and technology like this is in the hands of every person.

    scary, but it's just the idea of the masses using the same sort of tech the government plans to implement as part of homeland security department...

  • Combined with the cameras on phones, this would be a great technology... Instead of all text (or mainly anyways) blogs, you could easily snap a photo of yourself during a class or eating lunch and embed it in your blog. Although some blogs are boring as sliced bread (Sorry, I'm too tired to think of a simile that makes sense), photos would certainly add spice to those that are fun to read, and a new dimension into reading about others' lives.

    You could do the same thing with a camera, but good cameras are larger, so why not use a nice cell phone to take pictures, blog, and add pictures to your blog all at the same time?
  • 1. Even the most boring, inarticulate person on earth sees a lot of cool things every day.
    2. What this company is offering doesn't seem all that complex or all that innovative (although I guess getting the press release posted on /. was) - little homegrown sites like Fotolog.net [fotolog.net] have had this photos-to-blog-via-email thing [fotolog.net] covered since last year.

    (I've become totally obsessed with Fotolog - people actually update their blogs with worthwhile and interesting photos regularly, and people actually visit and comment on each other's stuff.)

    Whoever provides the mechanisms though, it should get interesting as more of these camera phones get out there...
  • A colleague of mine has been running a photo-blog (Phlog?) for a couple of years now, driving everyone in the department crazy with his photo obsession.

    I don't see what cell-phones have to do with this. He has a fuji FinePix camera that he takes everywhere. Once a day, the entire camera is synced onto his image-server, which serves them to the internet. The photos are viewable over here [zeger.nl]. Every viewer can add comments to any image.

  • "Captian's Blog Star Date 4815.6, Im starting to think someone should have spoken up back in 2003, 'blog' who came up with that?"

    sig. My new years resolution? 2560 x 1024.
  • I wrote an email-to-blogger interface for my Hiptop.

    It could easily be extended to use LiveJournal or any other XML-RPC based weblog because the Perl libraries already support it.

    See http://hipme.com/software/blogrouter [hipme.com].
  • Check out CarlaZone [carlazone.com] which is a blog with cell-phone camera image updates. She used to carry around a tablet computer with CDPD, but the Sanyo 5300 has better battery life and a form-factor you can't beat (especially if you already carry a cellphone).

    In Korea they already have full-motion video cameras, check out the story on CellCamZone [cellcamzone.com].
  • One of the biggest blog hosting site, Blogspot.com, has been blocked in China since Jan.9th, 2003
  • With the blog software I use, you can configure it to post a blog entry from an e-mail... and I can e-mail from my phone. It's just that easy... ...I could even do it through the web browser on my Treo, but e-mail's still faster.

  • And should be fairly easy to set up a home one, a
    sms 2 email gateway and your away.

    But "blogs" wtf did web logs/online diarys become "blogs!?

    Well as long as the /. Journal does not change its name, all is ok-ish with the world I guess, only newbies will call 'em blogs and everyone else can look at them as if they are shit.
  • So will cellphone weblogs spend all of their time talking about the wonders of cellphone weblogs? Or are discussions about weblogs in general fair game?

Slashdot Top Deals

Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it.

Close