Sidingsound

I mentioned in passing, in yesterday’s post about chir.ps (an audio equivalent of Twitpic), that Pixelpipe has just added a few new ‘destinations’ (i.e. content Web sites which it can submit items to). One of them was chir.ps, but another of the new services was a complete surprise, and one which took me back quite a long way…

Five years ago, I was using a Motorola V500 cameraphone (which took fuzzy, poorly-coloured 640×480 pictures that no-one could mistake for a ‘proper’ digicam’—my, how things have changed), on the Orange mobile phone network in the UK. In 2004, they offered a GPRS mobile data service, where for about £5 a month (I forget exactly how much) you could download the gargantuan amount of 4Mb of data in that month (and you didn’t dare go over that).

Around that time, I found moblog.net, a site where you could e-mail your text and photos to a particular address at their domain, and the content would then appear magically on your “moblog” page. Now, please remember that this was 2004, when most of the blogging and content sites were either yet to be launched, or were somewhat more primitive than they are in 2009 (and I’m just realising how far we’ve come in five years). This concept—send your photos and text from your phone, and have it appear almost instantly online—was quite new and exciting for me at the time, and for a few months I made the most of it.

Anyway, enough preamble: here is my Moblog page. You may notice a few things, but here are three I’d like to highlight:

1. The design is quite spartan (I think this is part of Moblog’s approach in general);
2. some of the photos are missing (I recall they had a catastrophic data loss in 2004, which led to a tranche of photos being lost); and
3. the entries stop around the beginning of November 2004 (and by the time you read this, they may have started again!).

I don’t recall why I suddenly stopped sending to Moblog—it may have been insufficient time to devote to sending material (my daughter was born two months later), or technical issues, but anyway my Moblog account fell dormant for nearly five years. The site retained my setup information, but I mostly forgot about them aside from when they sent the occasional e-mail newsletter.

Well, now I’ve added Moblog as one of my Pixelpipe destinations, it’s quite easy for me to send material there as well as to all the other sites (like Nigel Tufnel, I’m up to 11 now ). I’ll be testing this shortly, but in the meantime feel free to hop over to my Moblog page and see what you think.

In closing: it was a strange experience looking through my Moblog entries from five years ago, and it brought home to me how much has changed in the interim (to take two points, my then-unborn daughter is now a few weeks away from starting school, and I’m now on an “all-you-can-eat” mobile data plan). Moblog is never going to be a “primary” source for my witterings, pics and vids, but it will hopefully give you another way of seeing what I’m seeing.

Oh, and if it works well, I’ll add it to the ‘Elsewhere’ list in the sidebar here. Aren’t I helpful?