Whew! 

Got a good day's writing in. Feels great.

Maybe I'll have a play with Dave's moblog thingie. I'd tried to get one going three years ago or so. I thought it would be neat for the marching band kids to be able to post pictures and updates to a blog for the folks back home when they went on trips for competitions. Not just for news about who won the competition and how our band placed, but to post things like "Stopping in Kankakee for dinner at Wendy's; the buses will probably roll in at around midnight." So parents would know when to go do the pickup duty, you know. Of course now 100% of the kids have phones.

I'm almost out of that picking up business now with one kid away and the other driving. Whew! again.

Call it 'FieldTrip' 

That wouldn't be a bad specialized app to make, would it? A moblog for school competitions, away games and field trips. Make a newsy layout on the blog with a place for a pictures, maybe an embedded Flickr slideshow. Could have custom fields, like location, to make it special and easy to post to, so a poster wouldn't have to type in a lot of stuff and still be able to input the details to make a record of the journey.

You think cell service providers and phone makers wouldn't jump all over advertising on something like that? Kids are gold for this kind of thing. Well, on second thought, maybe not mobile service -- kids don't make the decisions about that, but devices for sure.

I think all the best new online ideas are going to be about special purposes, small communities and verticals. Or generalized apps built with later DIY specialization in mind.

Disallowed key characters for the record 

Leaving a trail of pebbles for anyone who might be following my trials with Expression Engine and mobile content. I'm still getting a "Disallowed key character" error when I try to go to my mobile newsletter story page on my phone using Cingular's MEdianet. It's an EE problem. There's debugging info here, which I'm going to try to ignore until Monday. Gotta wrap up this ebook this weekend.

Roadblocks to progress 

- Tricky back. Damn I hate getting old.

- No real world example for instant outlining.

Carrying on anyway!