Mobile phones invade the blog space!!!

Source : www.economictimes.com
Dated : 10/10/2006

This will surely be music to bloggers’ ears. Imagine using your mobile to post a blog entry from the lawns of Taj Mahal or a snap from the crescent beaches of Kovalam. Sharing your thoughts and pictures with the world is set to become instantaneous, with telecom operators in India planning to roll out mobile blogging, or moblogging services.

Blogging allows people to share images, videos and their thoughts with a group of friends or with everyone on the net using the world wide web. A mobile weblog refers to content posted to the Internet from a mobile phone or PDA. Reliance Communications (RCL) is set to be the first operator to host a blogging site in India.

“Our subscribers, who have MMS and video capability, will be able to send blog entries using mobile telephones. In case of other phones, only text blogging is possible,” Mahesh Prasad, president — Reliance World, told ET.

RCL has partnered with the Hyderabad-based mobile content provider IMI Mobile for moblogging. RCL will charge Rs 5 per MMS/SMS for posting a blog. Users will have to MMS picture or video to 1234 with the keyword ‘mblog’ and they will be automatically registered on mblog. A return SMS specifies the user’s password and the website URL for her blog.

“Bloggers can have a ‘buddy list’ specified from the phonebook, which can include both Reliance and non-Reliance subscribers so that everytime a blog is posted, they get an SMS alert informing them to check out the specified URL,” he explained.

To view the blog, one has to visit www.relianceinfo.com/mblog and key in their password. “The community of bloggers is growing. We want to ensure that pictures taken on mobiles are not left just in the phone. They can be shared through moblogging,” said Mr Prasad. Over 8m of RCL’s nearly 25m users access Reliance Mobile. “We are optimistic that a large chunk of these customers will use our blogging services,” he added.

Meanwhile, Greg Young, the CTO of Tata Teleservices (TTSL) said, “While we do not provide a hosted blogging site, with an appropriate handset our customers can access the internet and update their blogspots using the superior data capabilities provided by the CDMA technology.”

The same is true of Hutchison Essar, whose subscribers are using the mobile to make blog entries. TTSL, however, remains bullish on moblogging. “We recognise the exponential growth of the blogging community and emerging internet and 3G services. We look forward to bringing to customers innovative services following the completion of the policy on 3G spectrum and our deployment of this new technology,” Mr Young added.

Idea Cellular is offering moblogging through www.mygamma.com, a mobile networking community. Idea users can log on to this website and upload their pictures and messages and share ringtones. The service can be subscribed to for Rs 10 for a week or Rs 25 for two weeks (with online points). The company receives around 3,000 renewals every month for this service.

As of now, telcos in India are not looking at moblogging as large revenue generators. “It is being offered as a service required by the fast growing bloggers community,” Mr Prasad said.