- The Making of a Moblog
- What Is a Moblog?
- Motivation Behind the Lens
- Choosing a Moblog Site
- The Future of Moblogs
Choosing a Moblog Site
Nearly every moblog site has users who claim they are absolutely addicted to the experience. Membership numbers for popular moblog sites range between 30,000 users to more than 100,000 users. Monthly visitor hits number into the millions. Most of the sites are free and require no HTML knowledge.
Here are a few things to consider when choosing a site:
Spend some time looking at the community galleries to see if you have things in common with established users. How do they treat newcomers? Post some comments on some of the moblogs and let them know you viewed their photos.
Consider how many photos you will be posting and how often. Fotolog allows six postings a day, Buzznet keeps it at 10 images, and Textamerica currently has no limit.
Are the instructions for posting to the site clear and easy to use? Usually, once you have learned how to email a photo from your particular camera phone, it's simply a matter of emailing a photo to your email address on the site.
Consider the image size. Buzznet resizes a large image to 400 pixels maximum. Buzznet users are advised: "Don't compress your images too much, we run a .jpg compression on all files submitted, so if you send in highly compressed images, they get double compressed."
Investigate the special features. Textamerica has a useful section on camera phone reviews. Fotolog has a fun feature called "Random Fotolog" that can monopolize a lot of your time if you get hooked.
Does the site allow you to customize your moblog? Depending on your experience with writing code, you can either stick with one of many templates or add your own personal touch.
Check into the privacy and information-sharing policy. What protection does a site offer against people using images without permission? Brown says that Buzznet "allows users to select from various creative common copyrights that offer protection."