Mobilists - Best of 2006! at mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends

Russell Buckley finally posted his long awaited Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year nominations. He has been extremely busy lately counting the ads coming in at AdMob, undoubtly one of ‘the’ mobile succes stories from last year. Next to that Russell says it was a really, really hard post to write: “I’ve been chopping and changing things for a month now and it’s finally time to get it posted before we embark on 3GSM madness.” And more:

As you (hopefully) know, the Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly celebration of the best writing about mobile from around the world. This post brings you the best writing of the year and is therefore definitely worth reading in full and voting on your favourite one. Voting details at the end, but please don’t forget to vote.

Our finalists are chosen, by firstly nominating their own favourite writing over the year and sending them to me. Then, utterly ruthlessly, I whittle them down to 10 which I present here for your delight and edification. Over 50 entries were received, so what we have here is the creme de la creme for you to enjoy. This also means that if you entered and didn’t get this far, I’m sorry, but the standard was very high and I hope we can still be pals.

My post Nokia N91 Kills the iPod * got selected amongst the 10 best Posts of the Year. As Russell indicates, the post might not be the best I wrote this year but I choose it because it’s a very spontaneaous post on what is currently possible to do with a mobile phone, all the features and functionalities experienced in a relaxed environment with friends during a 2-week holiday. Away from the daily PC/laptop professional environment, being able to fully experiment the potential of what we write about nearly every day, not always having the ability to test all devices and applications in depth. I believe devices more and more have to be tested in real environments and situations, not only on their technical potential, it’s not about what a phone can do but about what one does with it!

Also, after all the hype we have been reading the last 2 years on music- and ipod-phones - I have been writing about it myself quite a lot here - it was pure excitement to experience the real stuff in real life in real situations.

That for me is what it’s all about: writing stories on experiences, sense, analyse, test and predict through my field experience the “when, why, where and how” of people using mobile phones.

Sometime the definitions of words get a complete different meaning, as for example with the word ’sharing’: it got a complete negative different meaning the last years with the digitalization of music, while ’sharing’ for me is a POSITIVE word: it’s all about the experience to ’share’ nice music while listening to it, the discovery, the excitement and the fun of ’sharing’ a listening experience with friends, like I used to do on Saturday afternoons when I was a teenager, going to your friends’ place with a pile of new discovered records and ’share’ some nice moments together, listening to music. Double-think this one for a minute

But let’s get back to the Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year and Host of the Year nominations and votings for the final winners. Winners will be anounced at the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards in Barcelona next Monday.

Thanks to the nice folks at Khosla Ventures - who will give the winner some cash, you can complete the Post of the Year vote here (password is “mobilists”), and the winner will get $1,000 and the runner up a very respectable $500. Finally, if you’re a host of the Carnival, click here to vote for the Host of the Year, the winner gets a FREE TRIP TO HELSINKI to the next MobileMonday Global Summit.

If you like my writing and would like me to have a chance to win one of these prizes, take your chance and don’t wait any longer to vote me on stage, the show will be live webcasted!

BTW: if you would like to meet some of the mobilists, come to MobileSundayBarcelona tomorrow!