Picture Phoning points to a round up of the main moblogging sites in an article in the WSJ (registration required).
– Textamerica – One of the oldest moblogging sites, Textamerica.com counts about half a million users, about 110,000 who keep moblogs and about 400,000 who just view and comment.
– Mobog – Mobog, run by Phil Kaplan, claims about half a million users, almost 16,000 of whom regularly send in photos (albeit many of them racy). Mobog says most of its users are in their 20s and 30s.
– Yafro – Yafro, run by the same company that created dating site HotOrNot, is free and has more than 100,000 users. Yafro has a special section of “Pictures from the Frontline,” featuring moblogs from soldiers in Iraq.
– Buzznet – Buzznet reports more than 20,000 registered users, most of whom have posted photos, and plans to launch premium subscriptions.
– moblogUK – moblogUK launched about nine months ago, has just under 1,000 users and features a forum where they can chat.
And interesting:
Most users of the sites, however, don’t actually post. They just look at pictures. For example, Textamerica.com says it has a total of about half a million users, about 400,000 of whom just comment or view shots, and Mobog says about 95% of its half a million users don’t have camera phones.
Essentially, then moblogging seems to be very niche and rather voyeuristic – in the widest sense (ie not necessarily sexual).
Having said that, I’d also argue that Moblogging as a term is used incorrectly here, or maybe the verb is mutating to include all photo’s taken on Camera Phones. I’d say that moblogging, strictly speaking, is using your phone to create a blog, which may (and probably does) include photo’s. Sort of like an illustrated journal.
The intriguing question is whether moblogging (by my definition) is the start of something big or is destined to remain an arcane pursuit of a few. I’d say (words that may come back to haunt me) that it’s the latter. Blogging really needs access to a keyboard or other means of producing text and lends itself better to a PC.
However, if we take the wider definition of digital photography with camera phones, I think there are huge opportunities. All we need now is a way of easily transferring the images to PC and storing them online for other’s to see.
See my next blog entry.
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