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The press can't be everywhere...

 
 
Char Aina
14:08 / 08.06.05
in discussion with mr falconer he mentioned that he will not be able to attend the g8 summit this july nor its baby brother, the g8 alternatives summit.

i got to thinking that there will be several people not in attendance who might be interested in watching the days' events unfold as they do, and perhaps some in attendance who would relish the opportunity to be front line reporters for the day.


i'm thinking something fairly simple, like a newswire in blog form, that people can simply send SMS or MMS and have either appear with a date, time, and ID(if desired).
sending to a number would be better as it would be more inclusive,but an email address would be better than nothing.
is it possible?
is it likely to be within my meagre webdesign skillset?
is there already a site like that that we can get a group account with?

does everyone else think it's a crap idea?
 
 
Char Aina
14:27 / 08.06.05
i was also thinking about the usefulness of being able to send a text to a single source and have it automatically sent to several 'members' as a result.
i have seen similar tech in oz, where a group of lawyers set up sniffer dog alerts(you text their sydney number saying "dogs on union street near kings cross" and all the sydney nased members get a warning.) and i thought it might be a good way of communicating around edinburgh/gleneagles and between such disparate groups as will no doubt make up the crowd.


is it possible?
is it likely to be manageable?
 
 
■
07:44 / 09.06.05
I reckon getting on to Flickr would be a good move. I'll be taking lots of photos and posting them every few minutes, and it's a piece of urine to do. It would be a good idea to get in touch with Indymedia, as well if you want to help them out, as they're pretty well organised on this sort of thing.
 
 
w1rebaby
11:25 / 09.06.05
Well. The only service I know of that you can blog via SMS to is Livejournal, and you need a paid account... SMS is pretty crap for this sort of thing anyway, not enough characters. Most phones can send email via MMS.

It's fairly easy to set up group moblogs... the only thing is they tend to require you to post pictures as well, so for anyone who doesn't have a cameraphone, that's problematic.

I set up an example one at g8mobile.textamerica.com. There's a secret email address to which you send stuff and it appears - anyone who wants to test it out, PM me and I'll tell them. The idea would be that you put your name at the end, or in the title, otherwise everyone's entries are indistinguishable.

You need to attach an image though; any size, doesn't matter. Could get expensive using MMS... what you want to do is send things over email via GPRS, which is a lot cheaper. Any reasonably modern phone can do this.

Flickr, as suggested above, would also work if you set up a specific free user, and is a bit more sophisticated when it comes to options with your images afterwards, but you can't make entries that are just text from the net. Also, there's an optimised page view for TA moblogs for phone browsers... g8mobile.tamw.com in this case. Again, most modern phones can read this so it could be useful for keeping in touch.

Not up on how to work an SMS alerts thing I'm afraid.
 
 
w1rebaby
11:31 / 09.06.05
oh, and you can post videos on it as well, which you can't on Flickr
 
 
Char Aina
12:22 / 09.06.05


cool.
i set up a textamerica account as well, but it didnt seem to have exactly what i was looking for.
i guess that may be the problem; what i am looking for might not exist.
from the sites i have seen i get the impression it should be reasonably simple to set up an email account that gets sorted into a blog. i mean, if TA are doing it and flickr are doing it then would i be able to do it?
 
 
w1rebaby
12:41 / 09.06.05
Well, if you've got a machine running a web server and a mail server, and you've set them up properly, and you've got a program polling the mail regularly and turning whatever it receives into a post to stick up on the web server, then you should be able to do it fairly easily, which I imagine is what the online services do... but I've never done anything like that myself (well, not the mail bit anyway) and I don't know of any off-the-shelf complete solutions.

I know that Wordpress can be set up to poll a POP3 account and post whatever is received by that account onto the blog.
 
 
Char Aina
12:53 / 09.06.05
yeah, thats what warren ellis told me.
i've also heard rumours that someone has made some PHP gizmo to do a similar thing.
wordpress sounds like it might be less of a headache.

*runs to google*
 
 
alejandrodelloco
00:23 / 10.06.05
txtmob.org is utterly rad. I used that for the inauguration day protests.
 
 
w1rebaby
08:27 / 10.06.05
That does indeed look like just what's required. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have any UK networks on the provider list.
 
  
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