Last week at SF Tech Sessions, Dave Winer showed me his new Blackberry device, and his many hacks that are going to make it easy to blog from a wireless handheld, or read RSS on the go. 
Having over come the shock of seeing Dave with a Blackberry, it became clear that Dave is now going to spend a lot of time evangelizing the mobilization of the blogosphere. Sure there are a lot of tools out there, and I have written about some in the past, but no one gets attention like Dave.
Dave’s timing is pretty good. I think a lot of mobile phones are coming with big screens and keyboards (Nokia E61 and E62), that make it easy to blog. For more mainstream audiences, photoblogging is the way to go. There are a lot of great moblogging tools, especially on the Treo, Pocket PC and Symbian platforms. Shozu is one of my favorite tools.
But back to Dave… or should I say Mobile Dave!
Update: Kent Newsome joins the conversation, and discusses the merits of Blackberry as a wireless modem.
I think people are treating this Blackberry as a web surfing and blogging tool the way mountain climbers treat a mountain. They move right past the why and just start climbing. Because they can, because it’s cool, or because they’re bored. Or maybe so they can try to convince more people to use their mobile computing products.
A mobile blog… Just what we all need. (Why not, actually, would be useful while travelling.)
Hanna
http://www.blogs.fi/blogiblogi
My greatest relunctance in purchasing a blackberry is because of the reasons for its “crackerberry” monicker.
Whenever we’ve looked at this in the past, the main issues have been:
(i) ergonomic – reading, and especially writing, on a mobile is a pain for more than a few words. Blackberry is better, but its still not a PC, which remains the device of choice for any serious work I suspect.
(ii) economic – i.e. the cost of using mobile bandwidth vs IP via dsl/wifi for much more than SMS
(iii) ecosystem – there is no real standard for mobile operations, so what works on one type in one service provider may not work on the next.
I have a 3G phone (RAZR) and a wifi iPac, its cool to do all this stuff on them, but the novelty soon wears off and the laptop gets to do the heavy hauling again.
So far the most useful mobile data device (for me) has been the 3G mobile card I use in my laptop PC so I can get online when I don’t have access to dsl or wifi. I can also use it on trains. I pay a monthly fee for it so its a simple arrangement no matter wher I am.
It’s bad enough trying to type with two thumbs while shooting out e-mails on the mobile. I can only imagine the effort needed to post a comment on a blog…
I don’t get ze Blackberry hype. Any mobile wiz IMAP mail client can get push mail, my Nokia N80 does it, I just don’t disconnect from ze IMAP mailserver. And wiz T9 typing text is quite fast, no full qwerty keyboard is not ze end of ze world, alzou it’s good to have.