April 14, 2008	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 7, 1429

SAN FRANCISCO: Mobile Internet devices and online communities are merging to a new kind of web diary: “micro-blogging”, where people fire off terse missives about what they are doing or thinking at any given moment.

The postings are bare-bones, on-the-go versions of online journals in which people share their lives and dreams hence the name micro-blogging.

“Blogging has evolved and become more formalised,” said Yahoo Design Pattern Library curator Christian Crumlish, author of social networking book “The Tower of Many”. A beautiful blog entry is an art form, and it takes time.

So, micro-blogging fits into your life where you take a minute or two to see what’s going on and go back to work.” Hot website Twitter has attracted a large following since launching slightly more than two years ago as a way to share Haiku-like text message updates with unlimited numbers of friends instantly via mobile telephones.

The service entices users with its signature line, “What are you doing?” Startup Utterz, publicly unveiled last year, goes a step further by allowing users to post text, video, photos or audio from mobile telephones to the internet with a simple call.

“What are the four things you can do with a mobile phone? You can talk, you can send text, you can take pictures and send video,” Utterz president Randy Corke said.

“We want to make blogging as easy as talking ... Our users can literally take their mobile telephone out and capture the experience, and the emotion of their voice, and interview people.”

Websites where people post blogs or share pictures or videos have become ubiquitous and firms like Twitter and Utterz are positioning themselves as places to merge and manage the images and words.—AFP