Archive for April, 2008

I’ve been exploring the mobilesphere recently - partly for my own interest (since I got a new mobile phone with internet browsing, email and a camera all-in-one) and partly for a section on mobile phone marketing in my book New Trends in International Public Relations.

Websites are currently optimized for a browsing experience from your desktop or laptop, both of which these days have speedy and powerful processors so that the website loads very quickly on your screen. The consequence is that many websites - as well as blogs and other social media spaces - have been designed with a lot of features, including multi-media, so that a visitor has a top-notch experience on the site. All means that a lot of data (measured in bytes - as in byte, Kilobyte (Kb) and Megabyte (Mb)) is transferred from the website to your computer for every page that you access. Mobile phones at the moment do not have the same processing power so access to many websites can be very slow.

WiFi is often free at cafes, offices and some public spaces - and of course, if you visit someone’s house with WiFi, you can log on to their system there. So, using WiFi, you can access the web for free. But if you are someplace where you can’t access WiFi, you have to pay for data transfer to your mobile phone provider to use the 3G connection - this is charged on a per byte basis. You can usually buy a monthly package data package eg so many Mbs for £X and there are some unlimited packages (though read the small print: in the mobile world “unlimited” doesn’t actually mean that at all!).

Data rich websites and costly data connection means that surfing the web by mobile phone can be a painfully slow and expensive business. And yet, more and more people seem to be accessing the internet from their phones. You can see the appeal - the phone is the communications gadget that many people have with them all the time. And many people have a lot of time where they are hanging around in between home, office and seeing friends eg while on the train or on the bus. A good way to while away that time is to access the web - check or write emails, chat with friends online, faff around on a social network and all those other things that you would do on the computer.

To best capture this audience, there are applications that can minimise the time it takes for webpages to load as well as minimising the amount of data transferred so that the mobile browsing experience is fast and cheap - while at the same time maintaining an attractive user interface. I’ve discovered a couple of these applications so that I’ve enabled my two blogs, Fusion View and ZenGuide, to be accessed as mobile versions.

The first is via www.mippin.com. I signed up for a free account and created Fusion View Mobile at mippin.com/fusionview and ZenGuide Mobile at mippin.com/zenguide. Mippin positions itself as a mobile social network for news and blogs so that you can access such sites entirely from within the Mippin network. I like Mippin because of the attractive first page when you arrive at my blogs - there’s a list of simple headings with photos from the relevant posts. At the bottom of each post, you have the option to email the post, Twitter it or Share it on Facebook, which gives an added interactive, social media experience. The main mobile Mippin site itself offers you mobile-optimised aggregated news and blogs to read when you access it on m.mippin.com.

You can get ZenGuide on your phone via Mippin by clicking on the “Make it Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

The second mobilising application is www.mofuse.com, which also offers free accounts. I created Mofuse versions of Fusion View Mobile at fusionview.mofuse.mobi and ZenGuide Mobile at zenguide.mofuse.mobi. This applicaiton has one specific function, which is to optimise your site for mobile browsing. The first page when you arrive on my blogs offers a neat list of the post headings but without images. Clicking through takes you to the whole of relevant post with the photos as well. You can access the comments to the post directly within the Mofuse interface (in Mippin, you have to leave the Mippin interface to do that) but there is no social media element whereby you can email the post etc in the way that you can within Mippin.

You can get the Mofuse version by clicking on the blue “Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

Do check out both versions and let me know what you think. Do you prefer one over the other? Are you more inclined to email a post / Twitter it or Share it on Facebook - or are you more interested in interacting via the comments section?

I got a new mobile phone a few months ago and I’ve been slowly exploring all its functions - and in the process, I’m discovering a whole new mobilesphere (I have no idea if there is such a word but it seems an apt way to describe the world of mobile media in the way that blogosphere describes the world of blogs!). My new phone is also a mobile computer, running Windows Mobile and 80% of its front face is given over to the screen - the phone part of it has a virtual keypad for me to touch-type the phone number. It runs a mobile version of Word, Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer. It has WiFi so so I can surf the internet as well as send and receive emails if there’s a WiFi service available - but I also splashed out and signed up for a monthly data plan so I could be connected wherever I am. With unlimited texting and a huge number of talk minutes on top of all that, the way I relate to my mobile phone has completely changed.

I used my old mobile phone solely for voice calls - and I did not use it a great deal as I don’t like shouting out my part of the conversation in public while I’m on the bus or in the street. I hated texting as I am not very nimble on using the telephone number keys to type out words. My new phone has a Qwerty keyboard (ie like a PC keyboard) as well as letter recognition on a touch-sensitive screen. Now I can email or SMS to my heart’s content in public - an excellent way to pass the time on the bus or wherever I am in transit!

Being a writer with this new writing tool to play with, naturally, I was curious when I came across an article about mobile phone novels. These are apparently huge in Japan. According to Wired magazine: “A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each.” The novelists tend to be young twenty-somethings or even teenagers who type their novels via their own cellphones. According to the writer interviewed by Wired, she can type faster on her phone than on a standard keyboard. There’s even a first mobile phone novel award - sponsored by the premier site that hosts these novels Magic iLand: might you call it the MoBooker?

There has been one author in the West who has written a novel on his mobile phone. According to a news report, “Italian writer Robert Bernocco took advantage of his idle time while commuting to and from work by train, writing his 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers is the English translation), on his Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system.” The book has been published in traditional book form by Lulu.com.

I have to say, I admire the abilities of these two writers to master the mobile phone keypad. Even with the mini Qwerty keyboard and letter-recognition function of my new phone, I do not have the patience to write more than a few short text messages or emails on the fiddly thing!

It seems to me, in the West, there has not been any novel specially written for the mobile phone, as far as I know. I don’t think that the reason is necessarily the difficulty of writing on a mobile phone keypad - presumably, one could write it on a PC, blog-style, and then post it to whatever mobile phone novel site there is around. I wonder if Wester writers shouldn’t try this potential new genre. It would be a great way for a new writer starting out to write 500 words at a time. It’s great for readers as most of us have our mobile phones with us at all times - it’s a handy way to read short bite-sized chunks. Writing short, gripping prose is pretty hard, to be sure, and reading a lot of text on a tiny screen can be hard on the eyes. But I think these are excellent challenges for a writer to evolve a writing style exactly suited to this new medium - rather like writing poetry to the constraints of the sonnet form rather than just sticking a few lines together in the modern free-form style.

Would you read a novel on your mobile phone? Do you know of any writers in English who have a written mobile phone novel? Would you, as a writer, be tempted to try writing one? Add a comment or email me and share your views.

Photo: thanks to europe.htc.com

As a writer, one of the most difficult tasks is keeping my notes and research in order. For my fiction novels, I had a lot of research on geology and the structure of buildings (for The Flame Tree, which involved a defective tower that collapses) and on digital technology and brain function (for Mindgame, which turned on a plot to manipulate the minds of Asians). That was just over a decade ago and most of the research was in the form of articles from journals and photocopied pages from books. There was also all my handwritten notes. I stored them all in folders and ring-binders and after awhile it got really difficult to find the particular bit of information I wanted. I also had some recorded audio interviews on cassette tape which I stored in boxes.

Aah, how I longed to go paperless and be able to find what I needed “just like that” (snap of fingers!).

Working on my current non-fiction book on New Trends in International Public Relations, there is even more research than for the two fiction books put together. Fortunately, now that we are in the age of social media there are some great tools to help me sort, file and access my notes easily. First off, I have a del.icio.us bookmarking account. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is an free online service where you can bookmark webpages that are of interest and that you want to return to again. You can “tag” them with keywords eg asia, social-networks, copyright etc so you can retrieve them again by searching that keyword. You can also add a short description and later, search the text of that short description to retrieve the item you want. It’s part of the social media world because you can share your bookmarks - all of them or only those tagged with a certain keyword, as you choose. You can share them with the world or with only the people you choose or no-one at all. People can subscribe to follow what you are publicly bookmarking.

On the wiki site I’ve created for the book, you can see the feed of my public bookmarks of the webpages that are relevant to the theme of New Trends in International Public Relations - scroll to the bottom of the page. Not only am I able to save the webpages, I can also share them so whoever comes to the book wiki can see what I am currently researching.

The only problem about del.icio.us is that it only saves webpages and I’ve had to find some other means of storing my non-webpage research eg notes of discussions, recorded audio interviews, random thoughts I’ve had while on the bus, articles scanned from or torn out of journals. They have so far all gone into the trusty paper folders again.

However, I recently found Evernote, a virtual note-taking and note-storing site that is in beta trialling. It allows you to bookmark webpages as well as add your own notes and attach photos and audio files - which means that I can keep pretty much all my research in one virtual place so that I can chuck out the paper folders. They don’t support pdf files but a workaround is to upload those into my online storage account at Box.net and link to it from Evernote. I’ve installed their mobile application on my PDA so I can take notes on the fly and upload them directly to my Evernote account. That application also optimizes the Evernote site online for viewing my stored notes from my PDA so I don’t have to clog up my PDA’s memory with old notes. I can also forward emails to the account - so if someone sends me email replies to interview questions, I can keep that email together with my other notes on the same subject. And I’ve taken to snapping a photo of any handwritten Post-Its or other notes and sending those to Evernote as well. And it’s all searchable by text or keyword.

There are some limitations in Evernote’s functionality regarding sharing, private/ public options and elements of their filing logic compared to del.icio.us but hopefully, they’ll be able to improve on those with the feedback that their beta users are giving them. The main thing I’d like to see is greater flexibility in being able to share by reference to specific tags. I’m not switching entirely to Evernote for the current book project since I’m committted to del.icio.us for that but I will certainly be using Evernote more fully for my next book project.

For all you writers, students, researchers out there, I’d say that Evernote is certainly worth a try. It’s currently in beta trialling by invitation only - I have 9 invitations left so if you’d like one, add a comment below and I’ll get back to you on a first come first served basis. Remember to leave your email address in the relevant field - I’ll be able to respond to you but it will not be visible by anyone else.

Photo: of files thanks to Stephanie Asher from flickr.com (CCL)