Tools of the Trade - by Patrick Thornton on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 13:52 - 1 Comment
Posting to a blog from a mobile device
I’m writing this post from my iPhone using the free WordPress application.
There are several instances where having the ability to blog from a mobile device is handy. I have a mobile data plan, so I can send in little updates from wherever I am. In a breaking-news, hyper-connected world, the ability to inform people quickly and easily is important for news organizations.
It’s not always practical for reporters to have their laptops with them. But news reporting shouldn’t be tied to one platform or technology.
The TypePad app (which is superior to the WordPress app) has a feature that will post to your Twitter account when you make new posts from the app. It’s also easy to upload photos to your beat blog with both apps.
In addition, many of the best beat bloggers take ownership over comments on their blogs by moderating comments themselves. Both WordPress and TypePad make it easy to moderate comments on the go via their Web interfaces (although I prefer TypePad’s mobile site). Neither, however, allows for easy moderating via their iPhone apps. Expect to see this functionality in the future.
With mobile apps like these, it is easy for reporters to publish content within seconds. Once a reporter gets back to a computer, he can add more details, photos and links to a post. This is just one more tool to allow beat reporters to cover their beats better.
Below you’ll find a sample photo. Sorry I didn’t have any breaking news photos.
Subscribe to BeatBlogging.Org via RSS.
1 Comment
Leave a Reply
Nice to read something about realtime blogging. At http://www.eclectro.nl/live, we combine a number of tools for live blogging for covering music festival. All we need is a mobile phone (with camera) and a fast internet connection (1 mbit, which is getting pretty normal in the Netherlands). From there, we can upload (without much technical steps) audio (gabcast), video (blip.tv), photo’s (mobypicture) and tweets, simply by using api’s to connect these services directly to our Wordpress-installation. We tested a lot of tools, and these 4 seem to work perfectly fine. We’re also testing Qik for realtime video streaming (blip.tv works in 2 steps: upload a video, which is then automatically posted to the weblog), which should make things even faster.