Part 1 of this look at moblogging is a shallow survey of the possible. The deeper effects will come when it changes how people think about memory, privacy, co-working, and place. 

Memory.

I had a training job at Compaq Computer where I met and spent time with 3000 people over nine months. If I'd snapped their portraits and blogged a few notes about each one, I'd have had some chance at sustaining a relationship, keeping names with faces. That would have been a career multiplier.

Imagine having near perfect recall of the meetings you've ever taken. All the business phone calls you've ever made.

Now imagine dipping into someone else's memory bank.

Privacy.

Mobile phones now go wherever people go. And so go cameras and the ability to blog from anywhere. There is no privacy. Everyone you meet, anywhere, can capture your conversation, image, location, and timestamp.  

You can't walk outside in much of Manhattan or London without being under constant private or government video surveillance. This is nothing compared to the tsunami of moblogged snaps, videos, and sounds.

We'll carve out exceptions. Some will be internal "safe zones," like the Davos "no press or public notes" sessions. Others will be social norms, like taking your shoes off before entering a home and leaving your cameraphone at the door. (Household mobile phone jammer: my patent pending.)

Co-Working.

Most jobs won't be affected. Many will be. And the nature of working together will change.

Lots of studies look at how videoconferencing affects teams. Moblogging takes this to the extreme. Plug into your team 7/24. Moblogging will eventually bring battlefield area network practices to the office. To the field. To the classroom. 

And with memory.  

Place.

Matt Romaine's comments are on point.

A place is not just what it is.

It is its human history.

It is what has been blogged there before. It is the social network comprising the people who pass this way. And what they saw and heard. And did there.

And a place becomes a nexus. A midpoint among other places this social network passed before and after. Tracings of how people use places, how we flow among them. Layered upon physical and political maps.

Think time lapse photography. With each moment commented.  

Follow the pub crawl. The march on City Hall. The evacuation.

See the where people first stop for food after long flights from Europe. Or commuter flights from D.C.

Moblogging exacerbates the technical and economic challenges of the digital life. But our humanity will both deeply shape and be shaped by these changes.

How can I apply the work context to moblogging? I'm using the term as taking pictures using your mobile phone or mobile camera and posting them to a weblog with a time/date/location/permalink stamp. I guess I'm also making the 3-year leap of assuming video capture where we get snapshots today. Marc Canter comments on responding to Russell's thoughts on moblogging. I agree with everything said so far.

What makes moblogging novel?

1. More opportunistic. Like your mobile phone, you'll have image capture with you 24/7. Snap as opportunity strikes.
2. More ubiquitous. Low cost means everyone will have moblogging devices. Your workforce. Your customers. Your consultants and advisors. Your investors.
3. More real-time. Digital flow-through means that events are captured and published in near-realtime.
4. More collaborative. The ability to swarm on an important or interesting event lets you form a rashomon and blind men with elephant composite view.
5. More organized. The 2004 generation of moblogging gadgets will have the royal trio of ID, date/time, and location. Thumbing a few keywords for topical context feeds search engines.

Enjoy a psychotic split with me. Imagine that you work in ...

MarCom.

With mobile cams and vids you can roll your own ethnographic studies. Watch buyer behavior in real time. Correllate with sales statistics by location.

Help sales teams. Enhance your CRM profiles with photos of major account contacts, meetings, facilities.

Moblog sales and promotional events. Create immediacy, share results, and broaden event reach.

Accounting and Logistics.

Nothing compares to eyeballing where the rubber meets the road. Moblog inventory. Moblog your customer, supplier, and partner operations. When combined with RFID tags, this may be the first time you visualize your supply chain.

Due dilligence? Get more done, faster, when you assess personnel, plant, products, and other assets.  

Operations Analysis and Industrial Engineering.

Document processes, the better to understand them. Photograph bottlenecks and other contraints, the better to fix them.

Record how people really work, the better to help them understand their own processes.

Competitive Analysis.

Shop the competition and share the results before you get back to the office.

You're WalMart investor relations: marshall 10,000 small investors to show the competition all across the country.  

Field Operations.

A field view. Add moblogging to everyone who drives a company van to install, measure, or repair things. Let them document their routes, their visits, the problems they encounter. Makes for better watercooler conversation. Helps the next gal to visit that customer.

Education and Knowledge Sharing.

Informal moblogging can ease personnel transitions. With experience, they can enhance the role of blogs as knowledge repositories.

Project Management.

A picture is worth a thousand GANTT charts. When your projects aren't virtual, moblog your status reports. 

Real world experimentation will prove or disprove these applications. I can't wait to start.  

[a klog apart community]