Nokia 7610

Taking MoBlogging to the Next Level

Listen up Google. Back in March at CeBIT, handset manufacturer Nokia unveiled an innovative piece of software - the Lifeblog - which, despite its name, was not actually anything to do with weblogs.

The technology allows users to organize chronologically any photographs, sound clips, messages or videos people capture with their mobile phone. The information is downloaded to a computer, where everything is arranged on a timeline, similar to a diary, journal or scrapbook. The trick was that the resulting ‘journal’ of the user was something for just the user (and, I suppose anybody else in the same room as his computer) to access, unlike a completely open and maximally accessible blog on the internet.

Well somebody took notice because this week Nokia announced that it has collaborated with Six Apart - the developer of market-leading blogging software Movable Type and blog hosting service Typepad - to ‘blogify’ the Lifeblog, i.e, connect the Lifeblog to the web via a Typepad-hosted blog. The latest set media features for Typepad have been designed by Six Apart and Nokia to enable blogging both with mobile phone and PC.

The development is notable not simply because is gives the fee-for-service Typepad a further set of add-ons that further distinguish it from the free blog hosting service Blogger (by Google), but also because it potentially takes blogging further than what has been done so far with moblogging (mobile blogging - essentially uploading one’s camera-phone photos to one’s blog, but also - in the case of Blogger - adding audio snippets from one’s mobile) or video-blogging, and makes the whole process a lot easier.

“Several trends are converging, making it not only possible but also easy to document your life and share it with others, from anywhere,” said Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart’s CEO. “Use of camera phones is now widespread, and weblogging is being increasingly adopted by consumers.”

Lifeblog currently works only with the Nokia 7610 phone and is expected to eventually be compatible with some other Nokia Series 60 phones. The combined mobile blog capabilities are expected to be available early next year… clickz.