You see, I didn’t tweet from a PC, nor am I the owner of a high-tech iPhone. I am what you could call a “low-tech tweeter”. I own a Samsung Tocco Lite mobile phone which cost me just under 130 Euros – pretty average if I do say so myself. When you dismiss the touch screen, all the other features are basic and it’s a little slow with carrying out tasks. There is no Wi-Fi and no 3G. Yet, I still tweet while on the move with photos, links and status updates.

I would like to demonstrate a few low-tech ways to Twitter from a cell phone.

Firstly, let me say that to tweet from the top deck of a bus, the beach or a mountain all you need is a mobile phone such as the ancient artifact seen here on the right.

Twitter supports SMS tweets. All you have to do is log into your Twitter account and select ‘Settings’ up in the top right-hand corner of you screen. From the list of tabs that appear, select ‘Devices’ and enter your cell phone number. Then, verify your phone by texting the code that appears on your screen to the Twitter phone number beside it. Also, save this number as this is the number you’ll send your tweets to via SMS.

If you live in the US, UK or other major territories then you can toggle whether or not you want to receive tweets from other people to your phone by sending ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’ to that number.

This is all well and good if you’re a basic tweeter but many of us like a little more interactivity. A previous review of mine here on MakeUseOf holds the answer – Snaptu. In summary, Snaptu is an application for basic cell phones that uses GPRS to get you the weather, film reviews, news, sports updates, allows you to use Facebook and more to the point in this case, Twitter.

The Twitter function is highly detailed and better than what you’d expect for a basic cell phone app. You can tweet till the cows come home by selecting ‘Update Status’, scroll down through hundreds of tweets, reply to tweets, follow links in tweets and view people’s profiles. More information on that little gem in my original review here.

But hey, what about pictures? Well, I tried several applications and I can safely say that for basic cell phones they just don’t make the cut so e-mail is your best option.

I actually think this is better than using applications which require you to start them up and take the picture using their bad camera function. With e-mail, you simply snap and send when you wish. I suggest using TwitPic, which Mark recently reviewed. Go to their site and create an account using your Twitter ID.

Then, click ‘Settings’ and use the options there to set up your e-mail function. You’ll be given a unique e-mail address to which you can send your snaps. A sample one might be JoeBloggs.4528@twitpic.com. Also, when you’re sending the e-mail from your phone, use the subject line as your tweet. As you can see from the picture I tweeted above, my subject line was “My train is here! Yay!”. Needless to say, this will also appear in a link and message on your Twitter profile.

You can use the above methods of low-tech tweeting on basically any cell phone that is post-2005. Once it has a camera and GPRS or EDGE, you should be fine. One tip I will give is to watch out for GPRS charges. They can be costly on some networks. My carrier has a cap of 99c per day and many others the world over offer similar packages. Just phone your network to enquire.

So, how do YOU tweet? Are you old-school or high-tech?

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In many regards, blogging is rapidly replacing the traditional personal diary. So powerful is the medium that jobs have been lost and people oppressed in countries such as Iran and China are arrested just for blogging.

But blogging at your PC can be a pain. Sure it was fine a few years ago but now things are much better when condensed into the palm of your hand, ready to tell the world about your love of old films or your hatred of Christmas shopping in October. The iPhone, pretty much epitomizing the smart phone, is a great tool for the blogger when he/she has the right apps.

Below is a list of my favourite blogging apps for the iPhone that I use for my own blogs.

Shozu

This app is what I would call an ‘all-rounder’. The developers have gone around to each blogging cake, removed all the frosting and thrown it together into this sweet little app.

As you can see from the screenshot it supports multiple blogging platforms which many of us bloggers use. These include Google’s ‘Blogger’, along with different social-networking and sharing services such as Flickr and Facebook. Furthermore, you can add similiar services to your list.

While Shozu is primarily targeted at photo and video sharing its blogging capabilities cannot go unnoticed and it’s a must download for any blogger who perhaps likes a touch of photography. It is available for downloaded here.

LifeCast

When this app first came out a good while ago I dismissed it as lacking in many features – you couldn’t even post to a BlogSpot account! However, they have released a good few updates with the most recent one filling the void left by Google’s refusal to develop a BlogSpot app.

Its interface is quite good as you can see from the screenshot and it’s easy to use. The ‘New Post’ function allows you to add images and text at the same time into the one post which is something lacking or ‘buggy’ in a lot of other competitor apps.

The bad part is that it doesn’t get up close and personal with Blogspot itself which would have angered Google – nobody likes people getting up close and personal with their services. As a result, once you make a post you can’t edit or delete it unless you log in on your computer and do so. However, to compensate you can save the post as a draft and decide when to publish it.

LifeCast is available here.

WordPress

Without a doubt this is the most ‘compatible’ of all the apps here, simply because it comes from the most popular blogging platform and software provider; WordPress. You get what you’d expect from this app.

All the shiny features such as adding images, links, changing the text size and font are included. You can have multiple blogs on the go at the same time and you can add as many blogs as you see fit.

However, while this is nice, you can do all of this on the other apps. What makes the WordPress app stand out from the crowd is that you can effectively manage your blog from your iPhone. This includes moderating comments, editing and deleting posts, scheduling and pretty much everything your get in the WordPress admin screen of your blog.  If you have any blog that uses WordPress or you host your own blog and use the WordPress platform then this one is worth a look.

It can be downloaded here.

TypePad

The best way I can describe TypePad is a toned down version of the WordPress app. It’s not for the power user; rather the guy who blogs on his way to work on the bus or relaxing on the couch. No need to worry about managing their blog as though it was a football team before the final.

It’s easy to use. You can view comments and indeed moderate them, but the main function of this app is posting and formatting that post. You can choose which kind of line breaks you want and how to align the text. All other features such as images and links come as standard.

A nice app if you fancy telling the world why you listen to ABBA every morning in the car to work, without having to moderate all the astounded and hateful comments later!

TypePad can be found here.

So there you have it. For all our iPhone users, these apps should put an end to your ‘blog by email’ days once and for all. Enjoy being able to create great looking blog spots when you’re miles away from your PC.

Once quick word of advice however:

While blogging from your iPhone can be easy and seem like the best thing since sliced bread it can really damage your hand. Ever heard of Blackberry thumb? The name comes from people who blogged, e-mailed and transcribed the Old Testament on their phones – the same applies for the touch screen iPhone. You have been warned!

What blogging apps for the iPhone  do you use?   Let us know in the comments.

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Mobispine allows you to blog by reaching the apps menu, finding the “Options” tab and clicking on the “New Blog” selection. This will instantly create a blog for you on the Mobispine network.

Who’s Likely to Find This App Useful?

Mobispine is pretty much for anyone who has a cell phone and simply wants to keep in touch with or publish any sort of news of any variety. It’s basically like housing a newspaper all on your phone. There are news feeds on just about any subject you can fathom.

Mobispine Guide

If you think Mobispine if for you and you’d like to run it directly onto your phone, all you have to do is access this link with your mobile device and your phone type is detected and if supported, the correct version corresponding to your phone will be downloaded.

If you’d like to set up the software, select a region and then a country. Next, Mobispine will provide you with a full set of links customized to your region. For example, if I told it I was in Canada, it would show me the news feeds from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. With over 200,000 sources in 50 different countries with access to over 30 languages, you’ll be able to find unlimited amounts of news from all over the world.

Check out Mobispine for the iPhone:

Within the menu you’ll find options for Tools, Mashups, New Blog Post and Tell A Friend links. In the Tools area you can change your account, check your data usage, review the settings for the client software and check for software updates.

What do you think about Mobispine? What are the other RSS readers you use on your mobile phone? Tell us all about it in the comments.

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While older devices weren’t able to transmit large amounts of live video in the bandwidth that was available to them, new 3G and 4G cell phone networks are supporting the ability to be able to transmit live, legible video from something as small as your cell phone, Smartphone, or Pocket PC.

Through some software you install on your phone, you can direct friends, family or others to a link where they can view the live video you are sending. But there are a few different services that do this, and we’ll take a look at each one and some of the features that separate it from the others.

Qik

Qik allows for streaming on the most devices of any available service that we could find and it also has an easy-to-use but feature-rich software application that allows you to put the video online.

The mobile application (which supports the devices in the graphic above) allows you to quickly change privacy settings, mute audio or the other options in the screenshot below. When you make a video, not only do you stream it, but you also archive it on their site for future viewing so it plays when you are not streaming. While streaming, information like the data speed, estimated delay (in seconds) of your stream and other useful infomation are overlayed on top of your video when you stream to their site.

You can create your own profile page online (similar to a YouTube profile page) where you can showcase your videos, allow downloading of them in flash or MP4 format and put up some information about yourself.

Videos can be embedded or linked to, commented on and the site even allows for a simple live chat window for your page/videos so users can chat on what you’re streaming.

And whenever you are streaming live, you can always see your video by giving viewers your profile page’s custom URL (www.qik.com/username).

Livecast

Livecast is second to Qik in the number of devices supported and has other useful features that other streaming services don’t have.

Livecast also has a desktop client so you can stream from a mobile device, or a mobile platform and supports GPS on select phones that can support it so viewers can see where you in a Google Map next to your stream.

You can also set a list of contacts that get notified when you start any stream. Livecast also allows for notification that you’re broadcasting to Twitter, Wordpress, Typepad and YouTube.

Livecast also has a customizable profile page where you can add your own logo, photo and other information about yourself and your streams.

Your viewers can also choose to view your stream in either a Windows Media or QuickTime format. Also, GPS information is easily viewed next to your live stream.

Finally, when you’re not streaming anything, a Livecast “teaser” plays on the streaming window.

Stickam

Stickam, while not fully designed for mobile use, has developed a client for only Symbian/Nokia phones and offers it on their website. While the client is simple to use, it only has a few features but connects your phone to the wide network of Stickam, one of the most popular video streaming/sharing sites online. Normally, Stickam allows you to stream from a desktop, but their mobile clients allows for use from anywhere.

From the software, you can adjust the settings of the stream (as with other clients). Just as Livecast and Qik do, you can also customize a profile page with a picture and archive of previous media.

As Stickam is primarily for desktops, instructions on how to download and install the mobile application are on the Stickam Blog here (software screenshot courtesy of the Stickam blog).

Do you ever use services like the ones above to stream live videos from cell phone to friends, family, etc? Let us know what service you use, for what occasion and how it went.

Photo Credit : 96dpi

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All you need to do (after registering for an account) is to open up your cellphone and speed-dial Jott’s toll-free number (1-866-JOTT-123).  Record a bundle of free notes to yourself, which will quickly be converted into text for you to access later online.  Once you access your notes, you can make use of the popular (and free) Google Notebook application to assemble these notes into usable material.

Outline Your Writing

While Jott is a handy & free tool, it suffers from a minor limitation unless you opt for an upgrade.  It will only allow you to record a message that is about 10-15 seconds in length.  However, unless you’re a blabbermouth, this drawback is actually a Twitter-like asset.  It forces you to be succinct when making your notes.  For this reason, it’s good to rehearse what you’re going to say before you make your call to Jott.  Simply take a few seconds to mentally outline your idea.

Remember however that the notes you make don’t even necessarily need to be structured as sentences.  That’s right, just fire off ideas as they occur to you if you wish.  Whether you want to dictate title ideas, keyword ideas, or the opening paragraphs of the next Moby Dick, feel free to dial Jott when you’re ready to get started.

Trust Your Memory

Once you speak a note into Jott, you cannot access it unless you get online.  So, you will achieve good results with Jott if you learn to trust your memory.  Keep your writing simple, starting with a basic outline, and expanding your thoughts step-by-step.  Don’t lose your train of thought by rambling or ranting.  Instead, voice simple ideas that you can build on later when you’re at home.

Connect-The-Dots

Once you get home, you can complete your work by first logging into your Jott account.  (Set one up for free, and add your primary & secondary contacts).  You will find notes that you sent to yourself, hopefully completely transcribed.  Occasionally, these notes contain small errors, and rarely Jott is unable to transcribe your message.  In such cases, it allows you the convenient option of being able to listen to your original telephone recording.

Here is where Google Notebook comes into play.  (Google Notebook is offered as a free perk to anyone with a Google Account).  Open up the mini Google Notebook at the corner of your browser.  Create a notebook to place your recent Jott clipping in.  Next, simply open the Jott notes you made while you were out, and copy them one by one to paste into your new notebook (unfortunately, the Google Notebook’s “clip” feature won’t work with Jott’s notes).  Once you are done, add comments if you wish.

Next, you can choose to export this new notebook to Google Docs, where you can edit it into publishable form.  To do so, all you need to do is press the “Tools” button in Google Notebook, above the “Save Now” button.

Inspire Yourself

If you begin to regularly record your ideas in this way, you may notice yourself becoming accustomed to the routine of realizing your most creative ideas while standing in grocery lines or waiting in the lobby of a doctor’s office.  Perhaps you would even like to prompt yourself to action in the middle of the day, while away from your computer.  If you want to become your own boss, so to speak, another relevant service exists that you can make free use of.  Wakerupper will let you record simple telephone reminders to yourself, which you can schedule to be sent hours, days, or even months ahead of time.

You can inspire yourself with the use of this service if you do a little homework ahead of time.  Let’s say you want to prompt yourself to write blog posts that are filled with popular & punchy keywords.  Just research the keywords in the middle of the night when you’re up for a midnight snack.  Then, schedule a call to your cellphone for the following afternoon.  Hours later, when your cellphone rings, a friendly computerized voice will repeat the keywords back to you, and you’re ready to make use of them.  You can then scribble them down for reference or simply keep them in your memory, as you think of ideas that you will want to send to Jott.

Have You Used Jott?

If you’ve already used Jott, and you’d like to share your own ideas about how to get the most out of its service, we welcome you to share your tips with us.  Tell us about whether you use Jott on a routine basis, or just every once in a while.  Have you made use of any of Jott’s paid services?  Do you use it to write emails, or just to record your random thoughts?  What would you like to see changed about Jott?

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“Yeah, I know man…the technology is almost there. It won’t be long now.”

So I went on my way, angry that mobile technology couldn’t keep up with my ultra-geek needs. Just a few years later, mobile technology has advanced to the point where visiting a website as simple as eBay is child’s play. Today you can check movie showtimes, email videos clips and pictures (captured with the phone itself) to your friends and family, and you can use applications like Fring to chat with your IM buddies without using up a single minute of your cellphone time.

Now you can moblog with Blogger.

One of the relatively newest mobile Internet advances is a phenomenon known as “Moblogging,” or mobile blogging. The way this works depends on which blogging platform that you use, but generally it involves sending a text message or an email to a particular address, and that message is automatically routed to your blog as an instant update. Why would anyone want to blog from their cellphone? If you consider the possibilities, it’s pretty obvious how this can come in handy.

• Post updates to a blog while you’re hiking the Appalachian trail.
• Update your family with mobile snapshots of you and your friends at Spring Break (or maybe not…)
• Investigative journalists can instantly publish breaking news to a news blog before anyone else.
• Publish a snapshot of that UFO to your blog before the FBI can confiscate your phone.

The possibilities are limited only by your own imagination.

How to Post To Blogger With Your Cell phone

Many websites that provide for mobile functionality require cellphone users to have an expensive data plan for their cellphone account. However, Google found a way to provide all cellphone users with the ability to moblog with nothing more than a text message. However, if you do have a data plan, Google also offers the ability to post even more content, including images, to your blog by simply emailing your post to a special Blogger email account.

Step 1 – Register For A Mobile Blog

Setting up your phone to moblog with Blogger is very simple. First, you just need to either text or email a message “REGISTER” to go@blogger.com from your phone. In my case, I have a data plan, so I used Yahoo Go to send the email to Blogger.

Within barely thirty seconds of sending the email, I received the following response back from Blogger.

A few seconds after receiving this response, I received a second response with my new blog name and the claim code. This code is how you can connect this particular device with any blog you like.

Step 2 – Enable Your Mobile Blog With The Claim Token

The next step is to use the code to claim your new blog.  To do this, get on any regular computer (not your mobile device) and visit go.blogger.com. On the right side of the page you’ll find this Sign In area.

Enter in the claim code that Blogger just emailed to you, enter the human code below it, and then click continue.

Step 3 – Configure your existing blog as your mobile blog

If you sent the “REGISTER” command with the same email address that you used to register existing blogs with Blogger, the system will recognize that you have other blogs, and provide you with the option to connect your mobile device with those blogs.

The new blog assigned to my mobile device was owlnut631, but on this screen, Blogger recognizes that I have three other blogs and offers the option to change where my mobile posts are published. Finally, I click “Switch to Better Content,” and I’m done with the registration and set up process.

If you don’t have any other blogs, then you can keep the default blog that Blogger created for you as your new mobile blog.  Also, if you sent the “REGISTER” command from a different email address, you’ll need to go into your mobile blog and modify the “Mobile Devices” setup displayed on your Blogger Dashboard page.

How to Make a Mobile Blog Post

Now that the mobile account is set up to forward posts to the correct blog, all you need to do is make a post!  If you are sending Instant Messages to go@blogger.com to create your posts, the procedure is pretty straightforward. The MMS text you type in becomes the post. If you send an email from your phone, you have a little more flexibility.

If you send an email from your phone to go@blogger.com, the subject becomes the post title, the body becomes the post itself, and you can even insert pictures as you would with a regular blog post. To test it out, I sent the following email to go@blogger.com.

After sending off the email, within just a few seconds I received confirmation back from the Blogger gateway that the post was successful. I couldn’t believe it posted so fast, but sure enough, when I checked my blog I discovered the post.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen the capability to convert data from a mobile phone into a web page so quickly. However, this sort of technology is booming. Now, you can also share photos, or post to YouTube, eBay, or Facebook. There’s no end in sight to both the possibilities and the potential for this kind of technology that integrates your mobile world with your online world. Today, there really is no such thing as being “offline.”

Do you post to your blog with your cellphone? If so, what have been your experiences with it?   Good? Bad?  What about moblogging to other blogging platforms such as Wordpress? Does anyone have any advice on how to go about it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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