Mobile Media Toolkit

Background: Publishing from Mobile Phones to Blogs (and Content-Management Systems)

What does this article cover?

This article covers tools and techniques for blogging from mobile phones. It explores mobile features of many of the most popular blogging platforms, and how reporters and citizen journalists can use their mobile phones to upload blog posts, comments, or multimedia content to blogs. Additionally, this articles also lists mobile features of content-management platforms.

Who is this section for?

This article is for

• Anyone who has a blog and wants to update it from a mobile phone.
• Anyone hoping to interact better on his or her blog with audiences that are on mobile phones.
• Any publishers who are interested in creating new platforms that enable audience interaction and mobile content uploads.

Why should you publish mobile content on blogs (and content-management systems)?

Blogs and content-management systems are already some of the most-used systems for online publishing. They have developed rich feature sets and very good online user experiences for both the audience and the content producer. Most blogging systems and content-management systems allow users to use mobile phones to publish content, and there are some very compelling reasons why reporters and citizen journalists should publish mobile content on blogs. Here are some:

• It is easy to do so. For someone with mobile content but no publishing platform, blogging platforms offer mature software that is easy to set up and run. For someone who is already blogging from a computer, adding mobile blogging just lets them do more.
• To cover news faster. Mobile phones are always with us, and news recorded on them can be published immediately.
• For experimentation. Reporters who already have a platform for publishing (like a news website) can still use personal blogs for experimentation that they can later carry over to their professional organization and/or fellow reporters.
• To be able to report in more circumstances. Knowing how to blog from a mobile phone means reporters can publish content without having Internet access or lugging around much equipment.
• Because mobile is where your content is. As we explain in our section on creating content, in many circumstances, it simply makes sense to create content on mobile phones. Being able to blog from mobile phones means that one is able to publish that content.

Description: Sharing Mobile Content on Blogs (and Content-Management Systems)

Sharing content (text as well as multimedia) on blogs and content-management systems, both hosted and self-hosted, using mobile phones (whether the channel be SMS, MMS, mobile web or apps).

Landscape: How is Content Shared on Blogs from Mobile Phones Significant in Journalism and News Production Today?

Blogs foster vibrant reporting from both professional and amateur journalists online. Professional news organizations, professional reporters, and citizen bloggers write on blogs, which are considered to be a fundamental part of today's journalism (see journalism professor Jay Rosen's 2005 piece and Harvard Nieman Journalism's 2009 report for more).

In recent years, many journalists have started producing some of the content for their blogs from mobile phones. Symbian user Steve Litchfield posted a how-to guide for blogging from a phone four years ago. Blogging by email (the technique he used) is available on almost all of today's blogging platforms. Other ways of updating blog posts from mobile phones are also available today. Many of today's blogging platforms can be updated from apps on many smartphone and feature phone platforms. Blogging using SMS and MMS is also available in many countries and, while imperfect, support for blogging from the mobile web is increasing as well.

Mobile blogging is often focused on uploading multimedia and short snippets of text; both of which are easy to produce on mobile phones. At least two blogging communities built for mobile phone users, Moblog and Phlog, are set up explicitly as photo-sharing communities for mobile users. The preference for multimedia and short-text blogging can also be seen in the kinds of platforms supported by mobile tools like Pixelpipe and Shozu that aim to make uploading content from mobile phones easier. Applications made explicitly for journalism, like Mobile Citizen Reporter, Al Jazeera's Mobile Reporting Platform, and the platform used by Voices of Africa are also designed towards addressing multimedia reporting rather than text-based reporting as well.

The preference towards producing and publishing "bite-sized" content from mobile phones is attributed by some commentators to the difference of producing content that takes 30 seconds rather than 30 minutes. On the other hand, stories of Japanese cell-phone novelists shows that content production on mobile phones isn't just limited to short pieces of content.

Today, tools on many blogging platforms make it very easy to blog from smartphones and feature phones. Mobile plug-ins for Wordpress (which is a popular blogging platform) make it easy to create, edit and moderate blog posts from phones. There are many other platforms (such as Phlog, Moblog) which are more focused towards producing photo blogs. Many have added mobile blogging by offering apps and mobile websites that allow live and semi-live posting of content (details in the "How To" section below).

Self-hosted blogs and content-management systems have more limited features for uploading content from mobile phones. These systems, like Drupal and Joomla, have plug-ins that help display the finished site on mobile phones. But uploading content from mobile phones to such sites is more difficult, and most often requires custom coding. Among content-management systems which allow mobile uploading of content, Drupal is the most advanced. MMS uploading functionality for Drupal was developed by the Mobile Voices project in southern California. Custom coding can allow organizations to add more mobile functionality as desired.

How To: Publish Content from Mobile Phones to Blogs and Content Management Systems

Publishing text and multimedia content from mobile phones to hosted blogs (like Wordpress, Blogger, etc.), self-hosted blogs and content-management systems (sites based on Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) using channels as diverse as SMS, MMS, email, mobile web, phone calls, and mobile apps.

Know your options

There are two main distinctions that need to be made: Blogs versus content management systems, and hosted versus self-hosted platforms.

Blogs vs. Content Management Systems

Blogs are a type of website maintained by an individual or a group of individuals, with regular entries of content (text, audio, video, photos) that are presented to viewers in reverse chronological order. Content Management Systems are more complicated tools that allow groups of individuals to produce and manage content in various formats: they offer more flexibility as to what kinds of content can be put into the system and how they are displayed, as well as what how many users with different levels of access can update the system (and more). Simply put, blogs are simpler forms of content management systems. Blogs are more often limited to entries that have authors, some content in the page, time the content was posted, comments, and some limited ways to categorize and organize those posts. Blogs have few features and require little technical expertise to set up and maintain, while content-management systems are richer platforms that offer much more functionality for expansion, but require more technical expertise to set up and use. For more, see Tactical Tech's definitions of content management systems and blogs.

Self-Hosted vs. Hosted Systems

Hosted blogs provide websites where users can sign up for an account and start publishing content immediately. Self-hosted systems provide software that users have to install on their own server first. Two important differences especially relevant to media organizations include: ownership of content (hosted systems 'own' your content while you own your own self-hosted content), and resources needed (hosted systems require virtually none, while servers and technical expertise are needed to set up self-hosted systems). Another difference when it comes to mobile publishing functionality is that hosted systems can have numbers that users can call or SMS in with content, but these need to be set up individually for each self-hosted system. More in-depth discussions of self-hosted and hosted systems are available in these articles on the Typepad blog, and Problogger.net.

For the purposes of this toolkit, we will look at hosted and self-hosted systems separately, but combine blogs and content-management systems. This is partially because there are very few hosted content-management systems that incorporate mobile functionality for widespread usage. Additionally, the line between self-hosted blogging systems and content-management systems is getting blurrier; the popular blogging platform Wordpress, for example, has many features of a content-management system, while most content-management systems now include blog modules.

Option 1: Publishing content from Mobile Phones to Hosted Blogs

In the following table, we catalog a few blogging platforms, and their mobile features. We have tried to collect some of the more popular blogging platforms, those that are important for civic expression worldwide, and those that offer unique features for mobile phones.

Generally, mobile phone users can update blogs in one of many ways:

• Using SMS. Some blogs support blog-posts to be created and managed using SMS messages. However, to allow SMS messages, the blogging platform will need to own a mobile number. Since this may turn out to be expensive, many SMS-enabled blogs usually only support the United States and a few Western European countries. Those interested in updating blogs via SMS may be interested in looking at microblogs as well. In the list of blogs we evaluated, only Blogger and Posterous supported SMS blogging, and only in the United States.
• Using phone calls. Again, because of the need to own numbers, few countries are supported, but some blogging platforms allow users to blog audio content by just calling into a number (which is often toll free). More tools that allow such blogging are in our article on reporting with audio information.
• Using email/MMS. Almost all the blogging platforms allow bloggers to create posts using email. Many wireless carriers around the world in turn allow phone owners to send email using MMS messages. Some carriers also let you compose emails using SMS. As mentioned, email uploading is supported by most blogs. Posterous deserves special mention, as it was built for use with email.
• The email/MMS is the easiest and least technically intensive process that lets users upload multimedia to their hosted blogs.
• Using the mobile web. Since the traditional way to update blogs is using the web, many blogs let you update them using the mobile web. Smartphones may be able to access even blogs that are not mobile web-enabled, but feature phones will only be able to upload content to blogs that are mobile-enabled. As you will see in the matrix, Wordpress (with this plug-in) provides some of the best mobile web support.
• Using apps. For many smartphone platforms, blogging software that updates multiple blogging platforms is available. App-based blogging can be useful because you can type blog posts over long periods of time and save drafts on your mobile, include pictures and video from your phone, and maybe even your location. Wordpress has the most app-based support on the widest number of platforms.

Here is the full comparison matrix of tools:

Mobile Blogging Tools: Hosted Blogging Summary

Mobile Blogging Tools: Hosted Blogging Summary (continued)

Mobile Blogging Tools: Hosted Blogging Summary (continued)

Option 2: Publishing content from Mobile Phones to Self-Hosted Blogs

In the following table, we will look at some of the platforms that allow you to set up self-hosted blogs easily. Sophisticated publishing platforms can often build on these tools. For these platforms, here are the main features we will be looking for

Email integration. Can users email to upload content? This is one of the easiest ways for content-management systems to interface with content-management systems. Extending this functionality can lead to allowing MMS-based uploads, as we see in the Mobile Voices example. (See our article on letting users create content for the potential issues for using MMS-to-email uploads.)
Mobile web uploading. Mobile web uploading capability doesn't need much infrastructure besides internet hosting. As a result, it is one of the things many mobile-enabled content-management systems will provide to become accessible on mobile phones.

Using Asterisk-based voice systems or self-created SMS systems. These two features let bloggers set up voice menu-based blogging, or integration with SMS systems that the bloggers can set up. More details about setting up these systems are available in our articles focusing on delivering content using audio and SMS.

Mobile Blogging Tools: Self-Hosted Blogging + CMS

Mobile Blogging Tools: Self-Hosted Blogging + CMS (continued)

Other options

Many content-management systems and self-hosted blogging systems are open source, and can be modified to add mobile functionality. Many more beyond those we covered are reviewed at Blogging Pro. Content management system comparisons are available at Tactical Tech and CMS Matrix.org.

With more programming experience, web application frameworks such as Django and Ruby On Rails can also be turned into publishing platforms that take mobile input. In fact, RapidSMS is based on Django, and many bulk SMS vendors use standard web protocols that such frameworks can easily interface with (see for example, Clickatell's APIs.)

Limitations of Blogs and Content-Management Systems for Mobile Content Uploading

• Most blogging platforms are only accessible using apps on certain platforms (usually iPhones), or the mobile web. This makes it necessary to own particular phones to blog.
• Even more mobile-friendly blogging platforms mostly support the mobile web and email. With both, uploading content requires data connections.
• The Mobile Voices development process shows that working with technologies like MMS is still difficult.