In my opinion mobile blogging hasn't really taken off. Most bloggers are wizards of the keyboard and have LCD-trained eyes. But the reality is that most things a blogger needs can be found on a regular 3G mobile phone (save the qwerty keyboard). Everything from email and RSS feeds to camera and video are on the tiny device you carry around in your pocket.

What's in my pocket? A MOTORAZR maxx V6. A new-ish HSDPA-enabled addition to the sexy RAZR series, and this is how the blogger in me uses it:

I've got mail
As a Gmail user, I've downloaded and installed the Gmail mobile app. It may not work on every phone, but it does well on my new Motorola as well as my old Motorola L7. Yahoo! Mail users can grab Yahoo! Go, a beautiful suite of Yahoo! apps specially designed for the mobile phone and Yahoo! Mail works just fine.

Read my feeds
One of the benefits of using a web-based RSS reader is you get to take it with you. I use Google Reader and while I love my widescreen LCD reading, when I'm on the go, it loads up just as well (even with pictures) in my mobile phones WAP browser. Here's how you do it.

A camera in my pocket
Most phones today have a camera. Sure its not much compared to my digital SLR, but it sure comes in handy for those parties and funnies that surround my mobile life. My phone's camera captures 2 mega pixels, so that's good enough for blogging.

Mobile vlogging
These mobile phone cameras often double up as video cameras. That's a good thing for those who vlog. I don't, or haven't tried it rather, but I sure see the potential here especially in doing a monologue with those 3G phones with cameras that face you for video calls.

Sharing my moments (on Flickr)
Another feature I find really neat in Yahoo! Go is that it lets me access my Flickr account and upload photos I take while on the go. Yes it does help that I have a 3G phone, so speeds are fairly good. I'm just waiting for the operator to upgrade to HSDPA so uploads will be a little more like home broadband.

Spreading the word (on Twitter)
Just because its hard to blog on a phones keypad doesn't mean I can't micro blog. Twitter is a lovely platform for getting the little bits of info out to your friends via SMS from the mobile phone. In fact, you can receive the messages from Twitter right on the phone as well.

Be the hot spot
Sometimes when I carry my laptop and inspiration strikes, I sit down at a cafe and try to blog. But not every cafe has free or working WiFi, so once again my mobile phone comes to the rescue. Without even taking the phone out of my pocket, I can connect to it via bluetooth and use it as a wireless modem.

Since Facebook just launched a possible Twitter rival that integrates right into its social network, it suddenly dawned upon me that Microsoft could do something very similar that would immediately create a user base many times larger than Twitter's without the users themselves realising the change.

Let me explain, since Microsoft Messenger 6 (I think) users have been able to add a personal message next to their display name. This long-time and well-loved feature, is strikingly similar to Twitter save the ability to have a thread of past messages and a mix of yours and your friend's.

I've seem the personal message used to denote current location, wishing everyone on a festival day, self publicity (alright I admit I do this too), and even... ahem... to do a Steve Rubel.

I guess the difference is that the personal message is currently a real-time platform as opposed to a time-stamped one like Twitter. But I see little difference since what you're doing now will inevitable be what you've done just before. In fact, it'll be nice to see a trail of "what I'm listing to" at different times of the day.

I don't claim to be a fantastic programmer, but I truly believe that all Microsoft has to do is build in those rather simple Twitter features into Microsoft Messenger and immediately you'll have a "twittering" crowd of over 400 million without changing anything about the way its users behave.

I hopped into a taxi this morning to get to work in the pouring rain. After tumbling over my wet self trying to fit through the Toyota's door with laptop bag, umbrella, while wrapped in a business suit, I noticed that there was a nice new touch-screen panel sitting right above the meter.

I happen to take taxis quite often so I know a new system when I see one.

After I told him my destination, the cabbie happily typed it in with an on-screen keyboard with his index finger one letter at a time. Curious to why he needed to enter the destination, I leaned forward and asked unsuspectingly "is that new?"

The cabbie gave me a gentle smile and said yes, and went on to give me the demo. After only typing in a partial string of characters, he moved his finger to the "Search" button and clicked it. The program paused for about 3 seconds and then gave a list of possible destinations which had the partial string as a prefix. Right on the top of the list was Shaw Tower. My destination.

The cabbie had a bit of difficulty hitting the one thin line which displayed "Shaw Tower" and tried to stab the screen with his pen (eeks!). It worked. Immediately a map came up with a bull's eye on my office building. How cool is that?

Unfortunately it isn't one of those full-blown GPS systems that talk to you while you drive and tracks the car as it moves, but still it was a good alternative to the printed Street Directory. The cabbie explained to me that he had to go through a 5 hour training to learn how to use the system, but was actually delighted by the fact that he didn't need to flip a book for a destination he didn't know.

His elation extended beyond the touch-screen to the backend where he explained that now there's a system that helps rather than hinders. He goes on to explain that taxis with this new system installed also have a GPS on board where a central computer knows each taxi's exact location. This has enabled Comfort Delgro to come up with a killer app for the shift changing dilemma.

The cabbie explained that he heads to Jurong when it comes time to change shift, the new system will know this and prioritise all bookings to Jurong for him (even though he isn't the nearest taxi to the pickup) so as to minimise wastage of his long trip up.

I thought that was a terribly considerate idea and a lovely one for cabbies. It is so easy for an organisation of this size to simply dump in default fleet management technologies into the cabs and hope for the best, but someone there obviously put him or herself into the shoes of the cabbie and has come up with a killer app.

Most of my friends say they talk to cab drivers about politics; I talked to them about technology and it made my day. =)

Ben McConnell from Church of the Consumer Blog wrote today in reply to Thom Brodeur's comment in a Chicago Tribune article around "cultivating bloggers" that:

Bloggers are not traditional media, so the last thing a PR person should do is create another column on a spreadsheet that includes in future email blasts.

I've been pondering this same issue while trying to help multiple clients reach their target bloggers. I do agree with Ben's point of view since we know full well that bloggers (most of them anyway) are both journalist as well as consumers and their platforms are conversations instead of editorial.

Ben then takes it one step further to say that the value of PR is in the relationship you can have with the blogger. That's fine too. We've been doing that with the media for ages and it definitely works for us. In fact, Hill & Knowlton Singapore just had our biggest media party ever last week!

Ben's post kept my head nodding while I was reading it in a train ride home until I hit the last line which said:

Save your client some money: stop pitching bloggers you don't know.

This terribly absolute statement stopped my head bobbing and made me smile. I know where he's coming from, but as a former journalist and blogger, I'd like to add that bloggers, just like journalists, are not stupid. However "close" you are to them, they're not buying a lemon from you. At the end of the day, content is still king and that's the Purple Cow for us PR folks.

Say, if I had a the latest gadget from a client up for review, wouldn't you tech bloggers whom I've never met approach me for a review unit?

Just this afternoon I twittered...

There's Twitter, Velvet Puffin, now Peekamo. Social networking moving to the mobile. Making SMS a social medium. Interesting trend to watch.

This this evening Mashable published a leak on Socialight, yet another mobile social network.

It appears that any device with enough computing power that commands human interaction is a prime candidate for the social web. This makes the mobile phone the obvious next choice. In fact, I feel that it is the obvious best choice for Web 2.0 since the mobile phone is more personal and more ubiquitous.

However nice a platform it is, these creators of social platforms have to realise that the only two services that have taken off on the mobile platform are voice calls and SMS. Personally, I check Gmail and read Google Reader feeds on my tiny Motorola L7, but I'm sure the majority don't. That leave very little room for communication if relied on the basic mobile services.

Twitter's amazing success is possibly because it leveraged the simple yet widely used SMS system whereas little is heard of VelvetPuffin where an application has to be installed and works only on specific phones.

But this may change soon. The latest buzz in the mobile phone space is, strangely, not about phones. The Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95 are being positioned as mobile computers that do a variety of multimedia functions. The iPhone evolved from the iPod music player, while the N95 possibly took some R&D from the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.

If these two devices do take off, it'll mark a milestone in mobile phone evolution and a beginning of true mobile computing. With that, things could change for app installed social networks or give a sudden boost to the traffic of the web-based oldies.

So I guess the networking guys were right, we do need IPv6. ;-)

Motorola is running a simple poll to find out what the public thinks of WiMAX and is giving away three new Motorola L7i mobile phones! The poll is terribly simple, just 3 MCQs and you're done.

Try it out at: http://wimax.motorola.sgizmo.com/

(Motorola is a Hill & Knowlton client)

Found this on Michael's blog. Totally awesome!

Comment on Metacafe says the game is called TrackMania. Cool!

I've been mucking around with my tumblelog hosted on Tumblr this weekend. If you're new to this, a tumblelog is basically...

a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. (Jason Kottke)

I have found it to be an extremely useful tool for creating a thought centre where ideas and findings are kept and sorted according to date.

Tumblr makes this terribly easy to post different findings via their control panel:

And the bookmarklet makes it even easier. For example, all I have to do is highlight text and click "Share on Tumblr" and I can place it as a quote with a link back to the site. Or post a picture and the bookmarklet will show you all the pictures on the site which you can just click to post. Simple!

But that's just the basics and still a lot of manual work on my part to keep posting. So I figured that in order to consolidate all my thoughts on one tumblelog, I'd incorporate little elements from everywhere.

This is the best part...

Tumblr allows you to incorporate RSS feeds from anywhere, so what I've done is added:

• My Twitter feeds. Only my tweets, not those I'm listening to. This helps me track what I've sent out and when.
  
• What I share on Google Reader. This is the same stuff seen to the right of this blog. I figured if it was important enough to share, it must have made an impression. So into the thought centre it goes.
• My del.icio.us bookmarks. Once again, just my own bookmarks and not the network I subscribe to.
• And last, a custom feed from a high-tech media monitoring service we have at Hill and Knowlton which I used to track the Asian mainstream media's articles on bloggers and Web 2.0.

What I don't do, although it would be cool, is incorporate my Flickr and YouTube feeds. I don't mostly because my photos and videos are often not related to my thoughts on social media, PR, or Web 2.0. But yes, you can feed them in directly as photos and videos. Cool eh?

So there you go, my personal thought centre. My plan, although I haven't really done it yet, is to consolidate my thoughts on this platform and use it to plan future blog posts. If you're an alpha geek (or competitor), you might like to get into my head early and checkout my thought process before it gets organised on this blog.

So feel free to jump into Ben's public thought stream at http://eok.tumblr.com and let me know if anything else should be added in.

I knew about the Nokia "You Make it Reel" competition from a friend over at Ogilvy PR (Singapore), she asked if I or my friends wanted to participate in the music video making competition.

What I didn't know, and now I find fascinating, is Nokia hosted the competition exclusively on Veron Ang's blog sparklette.net. We've all seen marketing moves that include sponsorships, product reviews, bringing bloggers out for dinner, etc, but to host a music video voting competition exclusively on someone else's blog tells me that blogs are now on par with traditional (or mainstream) media. Woohoo!

To the credit of the marketer at Nokia (or Ogilvy), they could have done a completely controlled campaign on their microsite but chose to go the "open" way by using sparklette.net as the platform and having the videos stream from YouTube. It could have been a marketers worse nightmare if for some reason YouTube was down for maintenance, or sparklette.net's web host met with an outage--but the plan went ahead nonetheless. Pretty daring guys, but nice move.

So that's 1 up for the blogosphere and 1 up for marketing too.

But upon closer scrutiny, you would realise that this competition didn't exactly do a "Singapore Idol". From the mechanism built into sparklette.net, only slightly over 750 people viewed the post (as of time of writing), which wasn't any better than her previous little review on Bakerzin - Warm Chocolate Goodness. If I may say, 750 voters isn't exactly ideal for a campaign of this size. But then again, we can't be too sure the accuracy of this Wordpress counter plugin.

Another thing I did, was check out Technorati for links back to this voting booth. Unfortunately, there was only 2. But if you discount Nokia's own Nseries blog, then there's only 1. Now there's another blog linking to it. This one!

That's probably why there wasn't any more visits than sparklette.net normally gets.

But still, great effort and welcome Singapore marketers to the blogosphere. Thanks for choosing a blog above the newspaper or magazines.

I hope yesterday's live performance by Greyskull at St James power station was rockin'. =)

The Straits Times today ran a follow up story on a reckless incident from 2005.

Driver crashes test car, sales exec dies
Netizens outraged that he's shopping for another fast car while still under probe over fatal test-drive
By Christopher Tan, Senior Correspondent

The story has resurfaced because of outrage against this young man who on 21 March 2007 began posting about his indecision between getting a Volkswagen Golf GTI and a Subaru WRX STI-S on mycarforum.com.

The trial by social media basically went like...

'Put him behind bars,' went the posting by Hamster Fest.

Legendkiller declared: 'He can run but he cannot hide. I will do my best to ensure that he does not get to drive another car again.'

According to the news article...

The online attack spilled into other online forums such as Sammyboy.com and Hardwarezone.

My colleague and social media advocate, Raoul Le Blond, brought the article to our attention and reminded us about the importance of the "old" social media such as forums (bulletin boards).

When was the last time you heard forums mentioned with all this chatter about blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and other Web 2.0-powered social media? I get the feeling we forward looking enthusiasts sometimes forget these "older" new media.

I'm glad to see the old and older media working together to develop and amplify citizen powered news.