twofones

CTIA / Billboard Confernece

Ah, Orlando.

From my hotel window I can see the shining convention center in all its glory, eagerly awaiting the throngs of mobile media executives that will course through its halls starting tomorrow morning at the Billboard Mobile Entertainment Live conference and leading into a week of CTIA fun.

Last year Paul Reddick from Sprint was the opening keynote at the Billboard event and he set the bar pretty high. You see, Sprint was a sponsor of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby so Paul came out dressed in the Ricky Bobby outfit that Will Ferrell wore in the film. He proceeded to make an impassioned speech, peppering his audience with loaves of Wonder Bread he tossed out into the crowd throughout the keynote.

This year I’ve been asked to make the opening keynote for the same event. I don’t have the Ricky Bobby suit and I’m not packing any Wonder Bread. I do, however, hope to live up to Paul’s example last year. And that’s about all I’m allowed to say for now.

Come check it out tomorrow morning if you're in town for the show. Details here.

Blogging is Hard

It’s been almost a month since my last blog post. When I started this blog I was posting a few times a week at least. Then I settled for once or twice a week. And now I’m down to this…

It turns out blogging is hard work. Or at least regular blogging is. When you’re deep in it there’s no medium like it – the connection to a community of like-minded people, the avenues for self-expression, the comments and replies and general forum for conversation that this unique genre of two-way media enables is priceless.

But it ain’t easy. I admire people like Fred, who has gone for years now blogging every single day. Every day. Fred moves his entire family into a new home and misses ONE DAY of blogging in the process and it’s a big deal. I go to San Diego for a few days for a meeting and my blogging week is shot.

Could mobile solutions help me to blog more regularly? I’m not sure. I regularly send camera-phone pictures to my flickr account and those appear in my sidebar, so that’s a start. But my style of blog-posting doesn’t really suit itself to a mobile phone. I need a good text editor and a spell-checker for one. And I need to be able to surf around the web for links and inspiration. I need to find images to download them to edit, resize, and place in posts. I haven’t yet found a mobile app that comes close to allowing me to do any of this.

It was interesting to see T-Mobile recently do a deal to integrate the MyOpera blogging and community app into their phones. MyOpera blogs are accessible online but optimized for use on the handset (and, interestingly, the Nintendo Wii.) The service looks cool but it doesn’t help me. I’ve got my communities and blogging software sorted already and need ways to access them via mobile. I don’t want to change what I do online just so I can access it better from a phone.

I’m looking forward to the world of Ultra-Mobile PCs and ubiquitous broadband, like what’s going on in Korea now. If I’m going to blog from anywhere but my desk I need the full compliment of PC functionality on a high-speed wireless network.

I’m almost there now, writing this from an airport on a laptop w/ an EVDO wireless connection. But this feels like less of a “mobile” experience and more like a “PC burning my lap and running out of juice waiting for the plane” experience. Which works in the short term, sure, but it’s not exactly an ideal on-the-go blogging solution going forward.