the moblogging revolution

In 2003, when a large-scale blackout wiped out electricity in North America leaving 60-million people without power, Diego Salinas created a unique bit of history. Salinas managed to take a few photos with his camera phone and posted them to a website (about a dozen people contributed 65 more photos over the next 24 hours). Now, not only was Salinas’ website part of history, he also helped popularise ‘moblogs’ on the web. A combination of ‘mobile’ and ‘blog’, these websites allow anyone to post pictures taken with their mobile phones. Moblogs first developed in Japan, where mobile phones with cameras became popular in the late 1990s. The term itself though, was coined by Adam Greenfield in 2002. What made Salinas’ site part of history was the fact that it was one of the first moblogs that moved away from the idea of a personal diary to a moblog about events and ideas. It showed that audiences can engage in ‘peer-to-peer’ journalism where mobile devices can be used for instant publishing.