As earlier mentioned, I got my mobile blog, MoBrownpau, back up, with help from a Communicam and Flickr’s mail-to-blog features. One shortcoming of this go-between method, however, is that Flickr only publishes the photo and title to your blog, with no caption or description; you must click on the link back to the Flickr photo page to see any other text you sent along with the photo.

This isn’t Flickr’s fault: they block the text because of the unsolicited advertising that US mobile companies insert into every MMS message sent. Witness, for example, this Flickr help thread on T-Mobile’s latest attempt to capitalize on their customer base with large, obnoxious, bandwidth-consuming image ads in MMS footers, thus breaking Flickr photo submissions. (That’s right: we’re already paying them monthly and per-message fees for the service, and still they insert invasive advertising. If we’re paying telecom companies to send our messages they shouldn’t be using our messages for their marketing.) For considering such an annoying factor and compensating for it by keeping the telecom marketing gunk out of our blogs, I suppose Flickr should be thanked.

I’ve decided to keep MoBrownpau on Blogger for now, rather than integrate the blogs as I did with BPBP; just to avoid potential clutter and cruft to the main journal. No that I mistrust Flickr, no, but it’s still a good idea to have a care with any output remotely generated by a third party. Moreso when two third parties are involved, and one of them is a US telecom company.

For future pondering: integration of output from different weblogs and feeds into a single stream.