Snapshots of what the keitai enhanced blog looked like can be found here (a clean example, the first image & text which were from Eudora of a keitai image).
The name "bloggette" owes its origins to Polaris Road.
Fascinated by the Japanese mobile technology and have explored several odd things in this space (mobile blogging, remote control cameras in synthetic environment, web based cell phone controller, …). This work owes significant credit to the encouragement and vision of Prof. Scott Fisher and to the creative environment at KEIO's DoCoMo House research center headed by Prof. Kenji Kohiyama.
This work was done in the fall of 2001 during the research for the i-Pocket project at KEIO which was a joint project with NTT Learing Systems (a more complete project description may be available soon on the KEIO website). Mark Bolas and I (Ian McDowall) were Assistant Professors in the Department of Media and Governance at the time. The i-Pocket project explored how seniors in Japan might use broadband and looked at the creation of shared digital scrapbooks (a little bit like Koukan Nikki in Japan). The scrapbook was also like a heavily imaged blog or diary. As part of this research we were thinking about the creation of the content - digital camera being an obvious one but they require one to get the pictures onto a computer, create an annotation, and then add them to the scrapbook - as illustrated below.
We were blessed at the time to also have access to some of
the early FOMA video phones, the Panasonic FOMA P2101V
model shown on the right. These phones have a built in camera (it is rotateable
in the hinge and in the image to the right, it is facing into the page) and
can make FOMA to FOMA video calls or take snapshots. Prof. Scott Fisher at KEIO
had arranged for us to have early access to this cool new technology which was
great - we started using the built in camera mostly for snapshots rather than
the video phone mode. It also turned out you could email the images from the
phones but not video clips because outgoing email messages were limited in size.
In thinking about i-Pocket, wouldn't it be more convenient to just take the picture with your Ketai, annotate it on the spot, and send it off to the blog…
Thus, with this motivation, we created a software system to realize just that. Armed with our DoCoMo FOMA phones, we started taking pictures email them to the "scrapbook blog page" where they would appear. The scrapbook in this case was a web site where the blogged content appeared. In line with our research, one can easily see the content being formatted and made accessible to normal web users, or through interfaces such as the iBook which was designed to present an online scrapbook to a senior. The iBook interface was also created to facilitate interaction such as adding personal comments without having to deal with a traditional email client or online service.
This project was created by Ian McDowall and Mark Bolas while we were Assitant Professors. This project was realized in the fall of 2001. The first successful images and comments were posed to the site in December 2001 from Eudora with images taken with the phones in November. We were able to use the FOMA phones to create content while in Japan around Christmas time 2001.
Contact Ian McDowall
Creating mBlog Content: The implementation consisted of receiving email messaes from the Ketai and creating the blog from the emailed content. A key part of our objective was to handle images and this was done by handling attachments to the text part of the email. An automatic email handler was created to handle email as it arrived at the blog account. The arriving is parsed into a unique file with the date encoded so that a simple sort of file names automatically provides a date sequential sequence. An image associated is also stored appropriately. Thus, content can be added to the blog simply by taking a picture with a Keitai and then emailing to the scrapbook. Content is automatically added to the blog as it arrives. An example of what actually arrives is here; images arrive and are given the same name. An example of the type of scripts used can be found here (Speakeasy.org where this blogging stuff was hosted in 2001 changed their email handler around so the scripts had to be adjusted).
Presenting the Blog Content: Presenting the blog content that arrived at the site used a CGI script to parse the directories where the email handler stuffed the text and attached images. The content is served up as an HTML page in reverse chronological order. The Blog We have taken a snapshot of the blog content, available here. Note that this is just a static page based on the content and is not using the live CGI scripts (for a number of mundane reasons). The style of cgi script used to present the blogged content is here (no provisions were made arroud security, etc.).