the cellphone blogging experience

after a few months of blogging, and many attempts at blogging from my cellphone (not all successful, unfortunately), i guess it's about time i put down my thoughts for posterity.

i'm not going to discuss the how part, because it differs from phone to phone, and it also differs from blog service to service. let's just say that the most reliable 'mobile blog' technique i've found is to type and save my posts on my cell, and then send it to my pc and upload it. not very high tech, but it definitely works all the time :D

so here goes:

advantages/nice things about mobile blogging as compared to blogging from your pc:

• note down your thoughts as you think them...because thoughts usually fade away as quickly as they come


• a mobile blog lends itself to the whole 'stream of conciousness' concept much better than a pc does, because there's less means to scroll back and edit, and more emphasis on getting your thoughts down


• mobile blogs tend to be more intense and less 'edited'


• mobile blogs tend to be shorter and more to the point


• they encourage you to blog more often, by making it something you can do using your idle time rather than setting aside quality time for blogging


• blogging at a pc sometimes gets the feel of forced creativity, where you first decide you want to write something, and then think about what to write. with mobile blogs, you write only when you're inspired

and now for the flip side:

• mobile blogs tend to be unstructured, thus lending themselves more towards certain types of blogs than others. for example, a post like this one would have been a nightmare to type on a cellphone


• the poster loses sense of size/space, as a relatively small amount of the post fits on the screen at a time, and there's no way to get a macro view of the post


• it's easier to wander off topic on a long mobile blog post, as you can only see the last few lines you've typed


• no true wysiwyg previews


• no spell check (but i've noticed i'm more accurate on the cell than on my pc, and predictive text usually makes typos noticeable)


• it's much slower to type on a cellphone than on a pc, even for an experienced texter vs an average pc user


• can cause pretty bad cases of texter's thumb and worn out keypads :D

oh and i'd love to hear if you've had any different experiences from mine :)