Your life in snapshots: Mobile weblogs

Nicola Döring and Alex Gundolf's article on the development of 'moblogs' or mobile weblogs allows us to approach recent mobile phone industry developments from an academic standpoint. Pointing to the convergence of mobile and Internet technology, 'moblogs' provide a means for users to archive their lives via photos that can be taken via a mobile phone and viewed via the Internet. Nokia have named their product to provide this service 'lifeblog', and it is this uncensored publication of everyday life that Döring and Gundolf investigate, from subjects as mundane as a user capturing his waking state everyday, to as personally and globally historic as the moblog by a US soldier in Iraq. What we are seeing in the 'moblog' is how organically some product development is in the mobile world--the early moblogging software came not from operators, handset or software manufacturers but from the social software community that thrives on the Internet. It is precisely this level of organic, spontaneous product development that occurs as a by-product of networked communities that many companies seek and often fail to emulate.