Creating Blog Entries Has Just Gotten Easier with Cell Phone SMS Text Messaging

As many of you know, I find it very attractive to stay on the cutting edge when it comes to using technology. My ministry and other endeavors have witnessed phenomenal growth and recognition after actively using the internet was implemented.

There has been a slight, critical difference breakthrough witnessed this evening within the capability of having a blog.

A blog is an online journal in which you and other people can post ideas, thoughts, and other publicly accessible information without requiring everyone to join a mailing list.

There are benefits and potential downsides, but the benefits outweigh the minuses.

The biggest challenge that I have experienced firsthand and I know that it is a larger issue is making the behavioral adjustment in creating a blog entry.

If creating a blog entry requires a lot of time and effort, then it is not going to happen.

I have been in a similar season with my mailing list Online Christian Soldiers (OCS) and this breakthrough may be expanded there as well via a blog.

The breakthrough is this: you can actually create blog entries from any cell phone by sending a text message (via SMS).

The entry is limited to 160 characters including spaces and the thought (blog entry) will more than likely be very concise and straight to the point.

If you have changed the blog's permissions, readers can post comments as well using web access, XML, or RSS reader software which is freely available.

I felt that this breakthrough was possible when I noticed that a blog entry could be sent to an e-mail address without doing anything else.

This evening I experimented further with the idea and found the way to change the settings to allow my cell phone's e-mail address to become a recognized and acceptable sender.

Adding the cell phone's e-mail address did not work because a confirmation was sent to the cell phone and the entire message could not be read due to the 160 character SMS limitation and there was a link that had to be clicked on as well.

What made the difference was changing my own user profile to use my cell phone e-mail address versus the standard e-mail address I created the account with.

Once my cell phone's e-mail address was recognized as my address and no further confirmation was needed, creating blog posts remotely became a definite reality.

The only possible downside experienced thus far is that there was a significant time delay between the time the post was sent and when it was added to the blog.

The time delay was 2 hours and 24 minutes. This delay could be considered too long in most cases, but blogs are not required to be tools for real-time communication although real-time communication is a huge advantage.

Blogs function as any other type of newswire with real-time access.

For our usage, the mailing list will suffice for real-time distribution and the blog will be used to distribute information to the entire world.

Blogs are also heavily weighted within search engines as well. So the original post and subsequent comments can be picked up by anyone searching Google or any other search engine.

There are many experiences of blogs being used to "scoop" major news outlets.

What I would like to see is the usage of blogs by more Christians and Christian organizations as well as any other organization.

Start a blog for your church, business, and any other endeavor as well as for your own family.

Now that you can create blogs from your cell phone, there is no reason to avoid having a blog for whatever endeavor you enjoy being a participant within.

I will be sending invitations for anyone to become a contributor of blogs that I have created and hopefully you will be able to change your profile to your cell phone's e-mail address.

If you do not know your cell phone's e-mail address, just send a text message to your own e-mail address and you will find your cell phone's address as the sender's e-mail address.

Yours in the Bond,

Roney Smith
http://www.tnlcomm.com/roneysmith