Blogging your life away anytime anywhere on a cell phone!

Many people do moblogging, in which they use a camera cell phone to post pictures they take with their camera cell phones and upload them to their blog through the cellular wireless connection on the cell phone. It's a way of capturing something right away and putting it on the web and blog, rather than having to remember to download the photo from your phone to your computer, and then uploading it to a blog.

I know for me, if I don't do something right away, it will never be done. So, if I'm travelling and take lots of photos, it would be really neat for me to upload right away from the camera to Flickr or to my blog or whatever site I use. Anyways, it still is not easy to attach a photo or to blog from a cell phone. A site called Glogger aims to make it easy to publish photos on a blog instantaneously from your cell phone and avoid the cellular fee charges for uploading.

How does Glogger work? You have to download a software on your phone, the software is written in J2ME and it connects to the Glogger server. Check this diagram from Glogger which explains how it works.



Everybody has heard of Blogger, which is Google's blogging software, which is what I'm using for my blog here. But a Glogger is someone who cyberblogs. What does cyberblog mean? Well, a cyborg is someone who has a computer attached to his/her body. So a cyberblog is a blog that is created a by a cyborg. Steve Mann from the University of Toronto is a cyborg, he wears his head-mounted eyeglasses and has a computer attached in his fanny pack and is able to communicate in augmented reality. Thad Starner is also another prof who is also into wearable computing. I had the privilege to meet with Steve Mann and take his wearable computing course in the ECE department as part of my PhD course electives. Mind you, I wasn't really a cyborg (although I would have loved to try on the head gear), although my colleague Sacha Chua actually did wear on a wearable computer in her undergrad.

Glogger was created by two U of T students, Raymond Lo from Computer Science and James Fung from ECE. I came across this from reading the U of T bulletin. They have a paper about their project from the ACM MultiMedia 2006 conference. Glogger software runs on J2ME phones like Nokia and Sony Ericsson, they have a list on the Glogger web site. They also run on Motorola phones like the RAZR V3x. My cell phone is a RAZR V3, I wonder if it will run on that? I'm tempted to try this software out just for kicks, if I can find the time to do so!

On Technorati: Glogger, wearable computing, Steve Mann, glog, cyberborg