Posting directly from your mobile phone to your blog during your gap year

If you're travelling abroad and want to make blog updates directly from your mobile phone to your website, make sure you check out Shozu.

Take a look at a previous post to see the demo of embedded video on the page.

This was done by sending video directly from a mobile phone to ShoZu.com, which in turn redirected it automatically to my public Flickr account, which I use to feed images to my castle-visits.co.uk and 80spoplover.co.uk websites.

From there, using the ‘Blog this’ tool in Flickr, it posted directly to this blog, pulling in my LiveSig as it did so (the bit at the bottom of this page with the logo and Google ads).

ShoZu.com can be used to send video and pictures directly to many sources simultaneously … look at this extensive list of destinations.

Now the science …

Strangely, although I’ve been into PCs for a long time now, that’s not replicated when it comes to mobile phones.

I’m happy with a mobile phone that dials out most of the time, and I prefer to use email and instant messaging systems mainly, Skype being my desktop-based telephony of choice.

However, I’ve finally replaced my cronky mobile with something reasonably decent … it can shoot video and send decent pix, and allows me to receive and send email on the move.

I bought it primarily as a journalistic tool … I’ve helped cover a number of really big stories in my working life, and if you look at the examples of the Grayrigg train crash and the Cumbrian floods, both those news stories depended to a great degree on mobile phone images.

How frustrating would it be to be on the scene of a ‘happening’ news story and not to be able to file material from the scene? Hence, the new phone!

I want to be able to send video and pictures from my phone directly to a place where colleagues can access it immediately.

At times, like when I’m on holiday or off somewhere interesting, I’ll want to send those videos and pix to a private ‘friends and family only’ area, possibly even a blog.

ShoZu.com allows you to do all those things.

Pros and cons

I’m new to this, but I know I like it already.

I’ve been playing for a couple of evenings now and here’s what I’ve discovered:

Bad thing 1: My phone is a Nokia 6300 … ShoZu.com says it’ll download directly to my phone, but I can’t make it do that. I’ve downloaded the file to my PC and transferred it to the phone by Bluetooth, but the phone won’t open the file … grrr!

Bad thing 2: I downloaded the desktop version of the software and that did the same thing … in fact it blue-screened my laptop. Not good.

Bad thing 3: I emailed ShoZu.com to seek advice. No reply. Checked my spam this morning and a ‘didn’t reach its destination’ note was sitting there … my email hadn’t been received. What’s going on?

Good thing 1: If you can’t download the software, you can set up ShoZu.com to run from an email address. You set it up to authenticate and recognise your mobile number, then it sends videos and pictures to wherever you’ve set in your preferences by accessing your account on your PC.

Good thing 2: You can change options easily so that you can switch to a public account (in my case Flickr) or to a private account (in my case Picassa). It’s a pity you can’t upload video to Picassa, because when you select Picassa as a destination you can actually map to private or public folders, whereas Flickr just lets you map to your general photostream.

Good thing 3: My friend at work, who introduced me to this software, has managed to get the fully functioning version of ShoZu.com on his mobile, and it’s far preferable to what I’ve got.

Each time you send a photo or video you can select where it goes to without having to change online preferences.

If you can get the phone version, do so. I’m going to persevere to see if I can sort it out on my phone.

ShoZu.com will link up with Wordpress blogs directly by the way, so you can actually post directly from your phone … my demo went via Flickr.

So when you're finally heading out on your grown up gap year, you'll be able to keep people posted at home without even having to power up your laptop.