I guess I would disagree a bit. Moblogging is still in its infancy. (Although Steve Mann has been doing stuff with mobile camera on the web for a long time...) I think the cameras and the other attributes of the device will get better. Imagine the Sidekick with a built in camera and a color screen. The new Sharp phone has a full VGA color screen! Foma mobile video phones do 384K. So, the dinky sreen, gritty image, thing will be fixed soon. Although the conversation style of moblogging will probably be different than weblogging, I think you have other ways to thread things. For example, if you leave messages and images in locations for people. For instance, if you go to a restaurant, you can push a button and it pulls up all of the interesting things people have written while they were there and threads you to other places those people have been. If you're going to a place, you search for people who have moblogged from that location, finding links to their images and maybe their weblogs. In an "augmented reality" (see my brother-in-law Scott Fisher's work on this. He's actually done a system of using mobile phones to annotate space with content.) sort of way, it's like annotating the real world. That's how I look at it. I'm this little thing crawling around the earth, annotating it with images, sounds and text. You leverage being mobile by being able to add location. This database can be viewed by time/location/ID and we can create meta information from that. (Yes, there are security/privacy issues.) [Joi Ito's Web]

There are two meaty things to take out of Joi's rant:

- Shared Reviews servers can house moblogging reports on various resturants, movies, clubs, museums, art galleries and any meatspace location.  Since the phone's UI real estate is so limited, Review templates will make it easy for folks to simply select: Post Review:Restaurant:Food:Quality rating...navigate back to Restaurant:Service:Quality rating and then finish with Restaurant:Ambiance:Originality rating. Simlar Reviews could be easily posted as you left a movie or when you found a cool party.

And conversely they should be able to access, via their phones: Find Review:Restaurant:Ethnicity%Location or Find Review:Restaurant:Price Range%Ethnicity.

- The time/location/ID idea could also be a server - based upon GPS info (and interaction with people's persistent digital ID's - of course!)  Not only could other phones be tracked, and compatible mates located and synchronized with you, but real world spaces could house databases of hypermedia information - available as Scalable Content and renderable not only on phone/PDAs or portable PCs, but also new fangled 'FM Radio watches', handheld PVR/DVD players and other kinds of 'information appliances.

Though the moblogging phone connection may seem to be irrelevant and a bit nerdy, I defintely see it as a crucial piece of the puzzle. All of these 'Islands' of technology stand on their own, as if they were separate fingers on the same hand.  (Or islands in the same ocean.)

But you know what happens when the all the fingers get clenched into a fist - right?

Idei-san definitely provides a vision a creates rules that guide the company, but it's the people like Kutaragi's that break that rules that create the breakthroughs at Sony. Sony is very good at allowing competing agendas to co-exist because of their structure. I think that where they suffer is that it's hard to connect a bunch of competing parts. Now that connectivity is the name of the game, Idei-san is changing the company to try to preserve the the Sony spirit of invention and leadership, but to network everything. What's really interesting to me about this process is that Sony is a microcosm of the basic software, standards and architecture issues that the world has. So to answer Marc's question... They're on all sides. When the answer becomes clear, they will obviously lean towards that direction, but while the jury is still out in their minds, I think they will let competing business units compete. And they can compete harder because they are bonded together with the Sony DNA and there is constant communication at the executive level. [Joi Ito's Web]

So in that sense - Sony is remarkably similar to Microsoft - who have placed chips on all bets.  I was not surprised when they bought WebTV, or put $5B into AT&T and $200M into Apple.  Microsoft's CE OS has been an albatross by some observations - as it completely competes with other 'embedded strategies' but yet - Microsoft still makes money off of it.

So too has Sony run a seemingly random course, with hits like the PS2 and disasters like the Sony Metreon.  I still hope one day they put the PS2 chipset into a PC.

Gam-batai-kurdasai!  (Here we go!)

This is good stuff.  liveTopics was using my own witches brew of code to inject topic information into the RSS feed.  Now it can do it with a proper set of callbacks.  And this will work across all categories as well.  Neat, thank you Dave. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Utilizing the Namespaces convention in RSS 2.0 is a key cornetstone lynchpin to our 'Open Standards Architecture' (or whatever it is we call it.)  Matt has been working hard to get Topics flowing through RSS. Now we need to do media, reviews, and other new kinds of 'micro-content'

This is when all the benefits come out from the years of work Dave has been investing.

Freeview: More evidence of flat-rate video devices

Freeview, a set-top box that allows buyers to get 30 channels of digital television for a one-time payment of £99 (about $180) has swept to success with more than 300,000 units sold in two-and-a-half months. The company has received two million requests for information and 700,000 phone calls from consumers.

TiVo, Replay, and anyone else looking at monthly fee-based business models need to take note of this. Hardware is something people see as a bounded purchase, unless it is deeply discounted to attract customers to on-going services (the cell phone model). Software services providers, too, should consider one-time pricing for their products or, at least, one- or two-year upgrade and service/support agreements rather than adding another monthly charge to the customer's credit card.

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]

But how does this work?  Do I keep buying additional set top boxes - each one associated with a finite set of content and services?  "There's one for pizza, one for sports and here's my 'photo album' box." That's absurd!

Customers need general purpose boxes that can be programmed with any DRM, download any kind of content, offer a wide range of interactive entertainment activities and gaming and all sorts of government, commercial or medical services.

Not 12-15 boxes - each one dedicated to another task!

Yes the business model is right, the attitude towards customers is right - but this has got to be a pervasive approach.  You can't just sell 'some stuff' on one box and expect end-users to buy lots of different boxes!  I can see having game oriented boxes, phone, TV and stereo oriented boxes - as we're all prepared for that.  But more than one box for movies, TV shows and digital services - is pushing it.

Lots of folks have more than one set top box - but it's because you need one for every TV. It's bad enough when your TiVO movie is on the TV system upstairs, but you wanna watch it downstairs, but getting only SOME services in one box and other movies on another - is crazy!

Maybe is each of these boxes were on the same multimedia Home LAN and could use tcp/ip to freely movie media and services throughout the home and one's digital lifestyle - but we know we ain't there yet and some would argue - tcp/ip will never suffice for true broadband media performance.

But that's for another discussion.

This comment just in:

So why we can't we exploit them? What's wrong with having a huge corporation supply hardware platforms for us to build cool solutions for? I don't expect Sony to do anything in the software arena - which makes our life - great!

And besides without capatilism and corporations making money, there's no economy and then regardless of what pays your bills, we're all f*cked.  One thing we've learned out here in San Francisco - is how dependent we all are on each other. 

Review Of Upcoming Projection Keyboards [Slashdot]

This is intense!  Projected light on the desk in front of you becomes a virtual keyboard.  And how freaky is it that four vendors come up with the same solution - at the same time!