Why the future of blogging has to be via smartphones
Om Malik is a genuine technology seer – someone who is invariably right on the button when it comes to predicting the future. So it is interesting that yesterday on the GigaOm blog, he decided to post about the future for blogging. The piece is well worth reading especially as he makes what I think is a very interesting point about who will be blogging in the future.
To summarise his argument then, Malik believes that we are all creating a lot more content (images, tweets, video etc) these days – whether it be through smartphones, Flips or notebooks. Those tweets, images and emails tell the story our lives and some commentators now call this lifestreaming. That content is then categorised and stored in one of two ways.
Two ways of lifestreaming
For most users using Facebook will provide an ideal solution. Their content will be housed there and they won’t be too concerned about exporting that data anywhere else.
However for what Malik calls ‘Power Users’ the story will be different. Malik says ‘today’s blogging software and services are the best option for becoming a repository of our digital creations, because they are more open, more extensible and at the end of the day, give us more control.’ I assume too he thinks that these Power Users want to say more than sentences with just 140 charactars.
Malik then cites Posterous and Tumblr as new gen blogging systems that give Power Users the chance to curate all their content and have a degree of control over it, in the one place.
Malik concludes that the new blogging software needs to be optimised much more for mobile devices as this is where we will be creating most of our content in the future.
He has a point and for me this is where Posterous has the lead at the moment. Not only can you send stories to Posterous via email, but also you can create image galleries if your phone is smart enough and the connection capable of dealing with large amounts of data.
The ultimate blogging software
For me the ultimate blogging software would automate as many of the annoying things that make it blogging a trial – e.g. sizing images, creating galleries, adding tags etc. If a person could then customise their software to make it work seamlessly with the iPhone, Nokia N97 and all their smartphone rivals, then I think we could see a real renaissance in blogging.
The only tricky bit then is how you input text. Spinvox trialled a voice to text blogging system years ago. It was fun, but didn’t really work. So ultimately blogging on mobile devices really does depend on the quality of the keypad.
What would make you blog again? Is it about the ease of use of blogging software or is it just that smartphones aren’t up to more than quick emails and tweets?
Here’s my thoughts on why Posterous is so cool.
