I came across this website on my roamings for mobile blogging applications. moblog.net lets you take images with your camera phone and upload them straight to moblog as well as being able to do text-only blogging. These are my thoughts on it as they come:

Step 1: Create An Account
Creating an account was pretty painless, it asks for your mobile number, e-mail and desired username and password. It then asks what e-mail address you would like to send new blog posts to. When you have finished the process it gives you the e-mail you chose earlier as well as a phone number to send texts and mms (how do you write that in plural?) to. Go to my profile here.

Step 2: Moblogging
There are 3 ways to submit to moblog. The first one i will be trying is via mms. I took a picture of my cat on my phone and sent it in mms with the caption “this is my cat” to moblog. I tried 3 times and it came back “unknown recipient” each time. It turned out to be my fault, I had put in the number wrong :s. I tried again with the updated number. Here are the results. I checked my profile as soon as i had sent it and it was up within 5 seconds. The only thing I dont’t like about it is the “…” as the title. I can’t find a way of changing that when sending via mms.

The second way of submitting is with e-mail. Using an image I made earlier I sent an e-mail to the special e-mail they gave me. I attached the image and put in some body text and a subject. Once sent I expected the post times to be quicker than by mms. How wrong could I be. It never actually posted. I tried it through my computer for the same effect.

Not put off by the failure of e-mail i tried the third option. By pointing my phone at m.moblog.net/add/. Being out of 3G signal I decided to send only a text message. It may have been my phone but everytime I logged in it would redirect me to the homepage and as soon as I went anywhere else it would log me out. Overall I managed to get 1 out of 3 methods to work.

Step 3: Customization
Customizing your moblog seems to be very limited. There are many different themes you can use but they offer no customization except for changing some about you text. As a moblog subscriber you can change the css which would be great, if I was willing to pay £5 a month for a service that mostly does not work. Go to my profile here to see one of the themes.

Conclusion
Usability: 4/10
Customization: 3/10
Features: 6/10

Overall: 2/5

Twitter is probably the second best tool for generating traffic (the first being social bookmarking). Twitter allows people to see what other people are doing and tell other people what they are doing. In other words its a toned down blog and rss feed.

So how can I generate traffic from this so called “Twitter”?
People love twitter because it is simple, all they have to do is sign in to see what all their friends are doing. Unlike RSS where you have to get your friends to set up there own feed on their website and then you have to subscribe through a link, Twitter lets you update, follow (subscribe) and find friends all in one site. Because of its simplicity millions have flocked to it and many bloggers have found that the amount of people following on Twitter to be larger than their RSS subscribers. Using twitterfeed you can easily post excerpts of your posts to twitter along with a link so people can easily find your blog and read it. Plus Twitter is viral, people can see who their friends are following and might start following as well. This combined with the fact that many people Twitter everything they do (including reading your blog) can give you extreme growth in short periods of time.

What has this got to do with moblogging?
Everything. Once you have a large following you could twitter about something from your mobile and lots of people will read it, follow this up with a full post on the subject on your blog and you have a large amount of people already interested. Twitter also enables you to break news first, hear something and you could have twittered it in less than a minute increasing your reputation as a blogger and all round person.

How can I Twitter via mobile?
Luckily there are hundreds of ways to do this I however will highlight only a few:

1. Twitter mobile m.twitter.com
Easily log in and post Tweets through your mobile browser. It’s so simple I can’t even explain it, you just do it.

2. Text Twitter twitter.com/devices
Go to the devices page on twitter and enter your mobile number. Text the twitter number with your tweets and watch in awe as your Twitter gets instantly updated. You can even receive friends tweets by text if you check the box on the devices page, FOR FREE.

3. TweetsVille for iPhone tweetsville.com
Find TweetsVille on the app store and download, it is probably the simplest iPhone twitter client out there. Log-In and tweet, read tweets, search for tweets and view hot twitter trends.

So why is Twitter going to take over the world?
In a sense they already have, they have the intimate details of millions of peoples lives on their server. The only reason we do not bow down to our birdy overlords is because they don’t want us to yet.

bMarks.mobi is a social boomarking site much like de.licio.us except its for mobile. If you look to the bottom of this post right now you can see a counter much like the one for Digg which should display a number of the amount of bookmarks I have. This is what bMarks is all about.I am sure many of you are addicted to social bookmarking sites. But have you ever done it on your mobile? I’m sure some social bookmarkers are frustrated by the inability to bookmark sites you see on the go without having to load up the clunky mobile delicious site. Well now you can bookmark with bMarks.mobi. Simply go to the bMarks website here, create an account and start bMarking straight away. Although it lacks the ease of use of a browser button to quickly bookmark sites you can use the bookmarklet app which adds your last viewed website as a bookmark by going to a special page.This can also be used as a marketing app for mobile blogs/sites. Add your site as a bookmark and encourage your readers to also, and you will soon be tapping into the growing bMarks community.So go on give it a click!