Reiter's Camera Phone Report: The longer you moblog, the fewer photos you send and
picturephoning.com: Moblogging Use Fades and the source.

A report seems to have a lot of people questioning the long term usage of moblogging, specificaly with photos.

Firstly, blogging in general is a hip thing right now and mobile blogging, specifically is very new and cool. I think a dropping trend would be expected, especially when looking at the same group over time. I mean, who really kept up their journals in grade school for a long time?

Moblogging, after the first few posts, can become a chore more than anything. Not only that, but someone who posts 300 in the first week and gets the $75 bill for it is certainly going to think twice before posting. The numbers are for daily usage. Can people really afford, on average, to spend 25 cents a day? Not only that, but does the average person _actually_ have something interesting to post every day? I'm not talking about the people (like myself) who will post the food they are eating. That really isn't all that interesting.

The other problem with the trend is it has a huge decline in the number of users. This isn't just because the people stopped posting. This may be because the user changed blog hosts, created their own, starting using a carrier given one, or any number of other reasons. Given the apparent growth of photo blogging as a whole, it seems it's attracting lots of new people. And certainly, not everyone will continue.

However, as time goes one, the people that do continue to use it will probably settle in on a rate of posting for themselves. I personally think that if everyone who sustains posting of one picture a week indefinitely has a tremendous amount of use.

I also think that the novelty factor will be dropping over time, too. In a year or two it won't be new and fun to post just for the post of it. A lot of early posts are just that. Or they are catchup posts. You might post 50 pictures in the first week and then drop down to a sustained rate of 1 or 2 a week. That also makes trends hard to follow, especially when looking at the same group of people. Looking at the entirety of a few moblogging sites may actually turn up different numbers and trends.

Anyway, that's just my two cents on the topic... statistical data is always prone to giving whatever answer you want it to give with little to no use of fake data.

Posted by Shane on May 12, 2004 10:16 AM | Permalink