On this day...

I'll be honest, I was struggling a bit to think about what to write today. So for some inspiration, I thought I'd take a look at what I and fellow mobilists were writing about on this day in previous years. In doing that, I was reminded of the Carnival of the Mobilists. It started in 2005 and the idea was that a blogger would do a write up of the week's writing about mobile. If you were a blogger, you could submit your article to be considered for inclusion. In this way, readers could discover more blogs and writers could attract more readers and followers. And it worked I got to know many other bloggers as a result and it was a good discipline to read beyond your normal remit.

So let's take a look back at what we were thinking and writing about back in November of years past.

November 2006. Rafe Blandford, writing his All About Symbian blog back then, wrote CoTM #52. Links include thoughts on Ajax, java and flashlite. Youth trends are covered. There's an review of the Opera Mini browser (we had smaller screens and less capability back then, remember). There's also a review of the Nokia E70. And of course there's talk about advertising, this time embedding them in ringtones. Check it out.

November 2007 and it's Mark Hooft's Ubiquitous Thoughts turn to host CoTM #99. His specialism is mobile learning which he looks at but he also covers Google's Open Handset Alliance which was the previous week's big mobile announcement. He also talks about mobile marketing - needing simplicity and also a link to Jan Chipchase and thoughts about design based on what you know about your consumer. Check the links here.

Mark Hooft also hosts CoTM #149 in November 2008. There's been a US Election and Barack Obama is the President. There's been a conference about Handheld Learning in the UK and the Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco. Round-ups of both are included. Money and the economy is a key theme this week also. We were right in the midst of the credit crunch at the time. Survival was key, and arguably, still is key. More here.

November 2009 and it's CoTM #200 at Jamie Wells' MobileStance.com The main theme in this week is Google buying Admob for $750m. Wow, 8 years ago. Time really does fly. Anyway, there's lots of chat as to why it's a good thing (or not) and why Google got a bargain. There's also some good thoughts about the uptake of mobile banking. And some other stuff too. Check out the edition here.

In November 2010, Andy Favell of MobiThinking takes the helm. He must have had a reorganisation of his website as it's dated December, but according to Volker Hirsch, this was from mid-November 2010. Here's that week's Carnival. There are some interesting posts covered with topics including mobile music, network operators struggling to own the social graph, thinking about branding and marketing on mobile, mobile commerce and fragmentation and the legal issues around films on iPhone.

In stepping back in time for this post, I'm astounded about how much good writing and thinking about mobile was going on back then. But also sad to remember that at least two of the prolific contributors to the carnival have now passed on - Judy Breck of Golden Swamp and just last month, Carlo Longino of Mobhappy and TheFeature. I'm also sad to see some of the blogs linked to are no more, including the site that used to be the home of Carnival of the Mobilists. I think the history of our industry is important. We need to know where we've come from to help us work out where we're going and where we don;t want to revisit. Hey ho. Such is life.

Until tomorrow.

Day 13/30 NaBloPoMo

Carnival of the Mobilists #252 is up

And I’m in it! Amazing to think that there have been 252 Carnival of the Mobilists postings so far.

This week’s carnival is hosted at Dennis Bournique’s long-running Wap Review and is well worth a read to get the lowdown on everything from usability to mobile advertising, from apps to mobile cities, and much more besides.

Enjoy!

Carnival of The Mobilists #168 is up

The Carnival of the Mobilists is still going strong and we're at number 168. Mjelly is this week's host for a round up of the best mobile writing this week in the blogosphere and it's well worth a look.

Want to know more about the Carnival? Then head over to the Mobilists website. You don't need to be Einstein to enter a post for the weekly Carnival either so please do try your hand if you have a mobile blog and fancy taking part. And once you've been included two or three times, then you qualify to be a host too.

Next week the Carnival is over at http://www.chetansharma.com/blog/

Carnival of the Mobilists #155

Photo credit: Creative Commons from Carf via Flickr.

Happy New Year to everyone from technokitten in London Town. I hope all the hangovers are put to rest and you're all raring to go for a wonderful 2009. Yes, the holiday break is over and it's time to get the mobile ball rolling again with the first Carnival of the Mobilists roundup for 2009.

A look to the past and future

Inevitably with New Year there is always an element of looking back on the year just gone as well as a look to the future, and our mobile bloggers are no exception.

Looking back, we have Renegade Fanboy covering Nokia's most important news in 2008, James Pearce gives us a retrospective of the last two years at dotmobi and Digital Evangelist discusses his own mobile usage over the last year (he is arguably a Promobs) whereas Renaissance Chambara tells us what normobs really use (well, the normobs in his life anyway).

Looking forward we have some very interesting posts indeed: Chetan Sharma has completed his 2009 predictions with aplomb by compiling the thoughts of a wide variety of mobile industry folks (including me, in case you were wondering). Rudy De Waele has given us (well me at least) a lot of food for thought with his take on what 2009 will bring. I'm just hoping he knows as many start-ups as I think he does so that number 10 doesn't sound so terrifying. C Enrique Ortiz discusses the future for Mobile Applications in 2009 (including the ongoing debate between native and web apps) whilst Frederic Guarino tells us why 2009 is the year of the Mobile Web.

Mobile Marketing

Looking more at the mobile marketing side of things, Andrew Grill has done a comprehensive review of Social Media Marketing and shares some of his thoughts on its contents with its implication for mobile, and mjelly shares knowledge on mobile internet affiliate marketing schemes and newcomer Dave Levy of MLTDA talks to us about the growth of mobile email and its impact on campaigning (political, marketing or otherwise).

Mobile Development

In terms of mobile development, Tom Hume (rightly) questions mobile context and argues there is more than one mobile context and asks you which one/s you're going to choose. There are interesting things afoot with barcode ticketing for UK railway companies according to Masabi. Vision Mobile tells us about the Adobe Mobile Packager and what that means in terms of where the desktop and mobile environments are headed.

The Industry

Ajit Jaokar over at Open Gardens shares his theory about Net neutrality being like capitalism... covering global connectivity, the fact that human nature is to gravitate towards freedom and what impact that has on MNOs in the mobile broadband world and beyond whilst Steven Hoober of Little Springs questions where the device ends and the network operator starts and what that means for customer service.

Devices and software

Ever thought about how secure your iphone is? Well you can find out here from allaboutiphone.net, and more importantly, what you can do about it whilst Tams Blackberry Blog tells us why the Blackberry Storm is failing and being returned.

Twitter is obviously the new black, in case you were wondering, and Wap Review has done a fantastic review of the best twitter mobile web clients on the market today so there's no excuse now to keep up with your twitter feed. Meanwhile, Igor Faletski takes new mobile browsers through the acid 2 test with some very interesting (and visual) results.

And last but not least, Judy Breck of Golden Swamp (and worthy guardian of the Carnival of the Mobilists) ponders the mobile as a knowledge tool and the part that plays in the Outliers (aka Story of Success).

Post(s) of the week

This is a hard one with such good quality posts and writers this week (as ever). For predictions, then you really must read both Chetan Sharma's and Rudy De Waele's posts. And personally, I'd like to see more discussion around Tom Hume's post on there being more than one mobile context. Perhaps some of you may indulge me?

Carnival of the Mobilists

The last Carnival of the Mobilists of 2008, #154, can be round here and next week's carnival 156 will be hosted by Wap Review. And if you're wondering what on earth the Carnival of the Mobilists is all about, then have a read of this and join us on the ride that is 2009.

Technorati Tags: mobile,carnival,carnival of the mobilists,mobile marketing,mobile web,mobile internet,devices,mobile software,mobile browsers,predictions,statistics,mobile statistics

Carnival Catch up

If you're interested in things mobile, then the weekly Carnival of the Mobilists is a must-read every week. Each week there's a different host and that week's host does a round-up of the best of the blogs on mobile. I've been catching up on my carnival reading and links to the last few are here:

No 83 is over at the hostess with the mostest, Judy Breck at Golden Swamp
No 82 is over at C Enrique Ortiz's About Mobile blog (love the carnival picture btw).
No 81 has an Egyptian theme over at the relatively new Symbiano-Tek blog.

I made it into Carnival of the Mobilists #70 this week

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is up - no #70 in the series - and it's a very comprehensive round up of what's up in mobile in the last week by Michael Mace from Mobile Opportunity. And I make it in too which is even better! Go have a read and see what's going down.

You can find the links to previous Carnivals at the Carnival of the Mobilists website. You can also find out there how you can contribute to the Carnival.

Carnival of the mobilists 61 - mobilist matsuri!

Jan Kuczynski has done a great job of this week's carnival with a Japanese flavour over at Wireless World Japan - go check it out.

Carnival Catch Up

Check out this week's and last week's carnival of the mobilists. Last week, Xen Mendolsohn did a great job of her Carnival and this week it's down to Rod McLaren at Mobbu. They're both worth a read. Enjoy.