Mobile journalism or 'mojo' takes Asian media by storm

I wonder when top of the market  DSLR full-size sensor cameras will have built-in 3G mobile phone technology. I suppose it would make the camera body bigger and you have the problem of the phone using the same battery resource as the camera electronics.

Still, I can imagine it happening once mobile networks up the bandwidth so that large format pictures can fly to their destinations, whether traditional media or blogs or websites.  Some searching  didn’t scare up any concepts for  such camera/smartphone hybrids. Could be I just missed finding them.

For now,  you’ll have to (happily) make do with some pretty powerful cameras  in smartphones running up to 14 megapixels (although most of the upconversion is digital rather optical) and the coming iPhone 4 with its (some might say meagre) 5 megapixel lens. (That isn’t stopping early adopters, though, with Apple counting more than 600,000 U.S. pre-orders for iPhone 4, which decimated previous iPhone order records!)

All these thoughts came to me after scouring some recent news stories and blogs on the subject of instant journalism, which has been  handily put under the title of Mobile Journalism or mojo, which seems to be a fairly new term, according to a recent story in The Irrawaddy. Sounds suspiciously like blogging, to me.

Then I read a Jon Russell blog on the fact that some big media analysis firm is bullish on online and social media advertising spending in Asia, particularly in Thailand. If you’ll remember, many amazing reports and photos came out of the smartphones of people on the spot during the Thailand protests, which sparked huge bulges in pageviews and commentary among the watchers from afar -- count me in.

And in this Thailand post-crisis period, several active social media  posters (Twitter, Facebook) wrote on what their equipment bags held while working from the protest front lines.

So without further comment, here are the links to these timely blogs and stories:

LINKS:

• Mobile journalism is a way to post faster and more surreptitiously in trouble spots, particularly in Asia, reports  The Irrawaddy online news site.
• Online advertising and mobile advertising spending expected to soar, particularly in Thailand, reports Jon Russell.
• Blogger and news hound Vaitor writes about his complete blogging kit bag.
• All things iPhone by Richard Barrow in Thailand.
• Richard Barrow Thailand blog produced strictly via iPhone files.