Om Malik writes that mobile blogs will be the next goldmine for the operators:
Here’s why. Everyone expected camera phones to unleash a flood of photo sharing and, with it, growing demand for bandwidth. But that didn’t happen because sharing pictures with your cell phone is a real pain in the neck: Uploading them is awkward and often doesn’t work. But moblogging relies on technology that makes it a snap: Sign on with a moblog service like Flickr and start e-mailing photos from your phone to that account.
No wonder sites like Flickr and Picoblog have been growing 30 to 50 percent every month. As more and more consumers share their pictures, you’ll start seeing carriers selling more lucrative flat-rate data plans in addition to their standard voice-only plans. I recently upgraded my $10-a-month mMode data plan from AT&T Wireless (part of Cingular) to a $25-a-month flat-rate plan, and my monthly phone bill went from about $60 to $75. You can see why carriers should be giddy over the growth of moblogs.
Veer Bothra adds about moblogs in the Indian context:
Blogging is at a nascent stage in India and there arent a huge number of blogs in the country. This is because the current set of blogging service providers like blogger.com are PC-centric. You are expected to have two things in order to blog – a PC and an internet connection. Which unfortunately arent many in India.
But what is overlooked is the fact that blogging neednt be dependent of these two. It is very much possible to blog without a PC i.e. by using a mobile phone. Moblogs allow users to share their cameraphone pictures, videos and comments through email or MMS which can be immediately viewed on the internet or mobile phone browsers .
With mobiles in India having four times the population of PCs, it is natural that the growth in blogging would be driven by mobile blogs or moblogs. This is the reason that there are portals like BlogStreet India and providers like Mobylog which focus exclusively on the blogging scene in India. Moblogging has great potential in a market like India where there is less PC penetration and fairly advanced mobile market and consumers.
