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Like Rudy, it took me a couple of days to recover from 3GSM and gather my thoughts. Pictures still fly by whenever I close my eyes about what I’ve seen and what I’ve done the last week. But that’s for another post. Apart of the adventures, this years 3GSM congress was the perfect opportunity to be a pure mobile Internet guy for a whole week. In practice, this meant not to touch the notebook for a week, leave it at the hotel, and do all my blogging, emailing, picture uploading, podcast downloading, web surfing, etc. from the mobile phone.

Well equipped with a Nokia N93 and a Bluetooth keyboard I kept uploading pictures to flickr and blog entries to my mobilesociety blog on a daily basis. Uploading pictures via 3G was out of the question due to still horrendous roaming prices. Fortunately, the N93 is also Wifi capable and Barcelona has a lot of open Wifi hotspots. So thanks to open hearted folks in Barcelona I uploaded pictures while coming or going to the congress. Also, Nokia had an open access point at their booth despite not even Nokia people themselves knew about it. Another convenient way to upload pictures over lunch. Thanks Nokia! Using Wifi hotspots was more of a necessity rather than comfort as it has one big disadvantage: You have to stay where you are while data is transfered due to the short range of the Wifi.

Sending and receiving my eMail and sending my blog entries on the other hand was much more comfortable as I used the 3G network for it. Anytime, anywhere, much better than the Wifi experience but also a bit more costly. A reprimand goes to Typepad, as they still haven’t fixed their blog upload via eMail service. Half the time my uploads were rejected and I had to try twice. Hey guys over at Typepad, is this really so difficult?

To stay up to date what is happening in the rest of the world during the week, I used the browser on the phone and mobile optimized versions of my favourite news pages (BBC, Tagesschau, Heise, Teltarif) over either Wifi if available or the 3G network. I also do this quite often at home while sitting on the couch, so I was already used to this part of my “mobile only week” experience.

I have to admit that especially for blogging I missed my notebook. I found that mo-blogging is still severely restrictive. In particular I wasn’t able to link to other pages, like my flickr page and other interesting info which is really a great disadvantage (hello Typepad…). Also, not having other web pages open simultaneously in different tabs restricts the ability to quote from other sources. Inserting pictures to be presented as thumbnails is also a pain. Thus, my blog entries of last week contained no links and no pictures. The links which are there today were inserted later.

All in all, I didn’t miss the notebook a lot, but quite frankly, I was still happy returning to the bigger screen and to use both the mobile and the notebook depending on the situation. Here are my humble wishes for next year to further improve my mobile experience: Lower 3G data roaming fees and an improved mo-blogging interface. Too modest?

This year will be the sixth time I set out to got to the 3GSMWorldCongress for a week packed with excitement and new wireless impressions and thoughts. Since Web 2.0 grew up and I started blogging, my 3GSM experience has changed dramatically. Before, I mainly went to the congress to listen to presentations and to discover new things. I rarely met new people and if at all, conversations where short and usually revolved around the product the person’s company was working. In many ways my real live behavior reflected the static web at the time, where information was mainly flowing in one direction, i.e. from big news web sites to people.In the meantime, the web has changed a lot and so has my 3GSM congress experience. I think I am quite well anchored in the Web 2.0 these days with my blogging activities. Over time, these activities have brought me together with quite a number of extraordinary people, mostly bloggers and information has started to flow both ways. My web experience has changed completely and instead of 1 to many broadcast communication I am now much more involved in many to many conversations. Web 2.0 at it’s best!

The same has happened for me at the congress. Last year was the first time I ever met some people at the congress (or at the Mobile Sunday to be precise) with whom I communicated before but never met in real life. It were only a few but during that week I made the acquaintance of many more who’s writings I’ve been following on the web since then. This year’s going to be even better. The mobile blogging sphere is well established by now and judging from the list of participants of the Mobile Sunday and the hundreds of people having registered for the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards, personal communication and meeting these people again have become almost more important than the congress itself.

For those of you being unable to come to Barcelona this year I expect the coverage of the congress and exhibition on the net to be as good as never before, thanks again to Web 2.0 and the Mobile Web 2.0. I’ll keep you posted about my thoughts and experiences here at m-trends and on my technology blog and will send the pictures I take directly from the mobile phone to flickr.

Following the response and feedback I got on the “Understanding Mobile 2.0” article I wrote at Read/WriteWeb a couple of weeks ago, I created a wiki space to start categorizing the so-called Mobile 2.0 companies.

You can acces the directory at mobile2companies.com.

I decided to use a wiki tool, called Wepaint, so companies can add their own information and keep it updated. You just need to sign-up to add your Mobile 2.0 company info page, you can add images, slideshows, video’s, and RSS feeds as well, and tag your page(s).

Companies can use the tool to keep the web community updated with latest news, elevator pitches, presentations of new products/services, etc. You can browse the wiki by category, by keywords, subscribe to the wiki feeds on new pages added or updated, comments and news, a lot of other stuff out there yet to discover.

The directory is far from complete, I just gave it an initial injection and added some companies I know to start with, so the best thing to do is add your page if you don’t find your company in there and update your page if you don’t like what I added, it’s a wiki, you know

Kudos to Carlo for helping me with the introduction texts.

Contact me if you would like to contribute to this project, to become a writer/moderator, to help develop the wiki, and for any suggestion and comments. I hope these pages will be usefull for the entire mobile value chain, spread the word!

Year end goes together with the usual Top 100 of the year (or all times). You can check my most played music of 2006 and a lot more here at MyStrands.com. You can do all this also on your cell going to m.mystrands.com. And check what’s happening around on New Years’ Eve on your mobile phone at m-partystrands.com, including live partyStrands parties going on at the partyStrands blog.

Now isn’t this cool to start a New Year?

m-trends.org is selected by Fierce Wireless readers into the Top 20 Wireless Industry Blogs.

Thanks to all the readers who voted for m-trends.org, I really appreciate your support!

After a month of nominating and voting, Fierce readers picked 20 blogs that certainly represent the crème de la crème in industry coverage. FierceWireless links to most of these blogs on a regular basis and so they deserve the recognition of being a Fierce Favorite. After thousands of votes and a list of nearly 80 blogs, these are the 20 that our readers picked as the best…

Though my personal top 20 looks slightly different, I think the blogs selected are in majority representative of what’s out there. I’m really proud and happy I’m listed next to well known industry blogs like Gizmodo, O’Reilly Emerging Telephony, Engadget Mobile, GigaOM, The Mobile Technology Weblog, TechDirt Wireless, Phonescoop and MocoNews.

It’s great to see that a lot of fellow mobilist bloggers like Russell and Carlo (Mobhappy), Emily (Textually), Ajit with Open Gardens, Justin (MoPocket) and Darla are represented in this selection. You can view the complete list in alphabetical order here.

Some great blogs seem to be missing though, for example where are MobileCrunch and All About Symbian? (btw: now hosting this weeks’s excellent Carnival of the Mobilists #52)

I’ll suppose this will keep me going despite the fact that it’s getting more and more difficult for me to make time available to blog. Many thanks again for all who supported me!

To be honest, I am not really a “top this and that” kind-a-guy, but recently I wandered how popular mobile blogs (bloggers writing about mobile & wireless technology and lifestyle) are in the overall blogosphere. We all know there is a Technorati TOP 100, not that’s it’s completely accurate - here today, gone tomorrow, but I think it gives a good overview based on the number of links people make to a blog, which is ‘a’ measure of popularity of course. I just want you to know that this is not an intend for an official top but rather a personal evaluation I wanted to share with you.

The Technorati top currently is crowded by (now classic) blogs such as EnGadget, Boing Boing, Gizmodo and a lot of blogs reporting on web 2.0, including tech writers such as Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Scobleizer and Om Malik, just to name a few out of all the other great blogs out there.

I was actually surpised finding Smart Mobs just out of the TOP 1.000 (!), which made me think there are a lot of sites inbetween the 100 and the 1.000 that think mobile is not so important to write on, or mobile blogs are maybe just too boring for many readers - apart from the gadget sites, and/or maybe they are just too specialised? Yes, the ‘good old boys’ in the TOP 100 are writing about mobile too once in a while of course and for sure, the mobile lifestyle as we report on regularely isn’t mass market just yet. I can see easily however my dear mobile bloggers collegues becoming more and more popular as mobile will become more important in our day-to-day lifestyle in the near future.

So, here are the popular mobile blog sites, according Technorati.

1. Smart Mobs - rank: 1,033 (4,755 links from 1,081 blogs)
2. textually.org - rank: 1,181 (3,213 links from 1,009 blogs)
3. MobileBurn - rank: 1,868 (5,609 links from 766 blogs)
4. All About Symbian - rank: 2,833 (1,864 links from 589 blogs)
5. MobileCrunch - rank: 3,465 (1,538 links from 508 blogs)
6. MobHappy - rank: 4,920 (1,344 links from 390 blogs)
7. pasta and vinegar - rank: 6,187 (1,145 links from 332 blogs)
8. The Mobile Technology Weblog - rank: 7,928 (2,565 links from 262 blogs)
9. Mopocket rank: N/A (569 links to this URL sorted)
10. Open Gardens - rank: 9,230 (510 links from 232 blogs)
11. Mobile Mentalism - rank: 11,626 (465 links from 189 blogs)
12. Techdirt Wireless - rank: 12,632 (434 links from 175 blogs)
13. Darla Mack - rank: 13,125 (859 links from 169 blogs)
14. Communities Dominate Brands - rank: 13,203 (446 links from 166 blogs)
15. m-trends.org - rank: 17,238 (435 links from 132 blogs)
16. mobile jones - rank: 18,012 (343 links from 127 blogs)
17. The 3G Portal - rank: 18,195 (352 links from 126 blogs)
18. The Pondering Primate - rank: 19,256 (255 links from 120 blogs)
19. gotomobile.com - rank: 22,255 (226 links from 106 blogs)
20. Mobile Opportunity - rank: 23,427 (229 links from 101 blogs)

If you think it makes sence keeping such a top and even extend it, give me a wink and I’ll think to keep this updated every now and then. Please note that this is just my personal check on mobile blogs I’m most familiar with, if I should have left somebody out, please contact me so I can correct if I’m completely missing the ball here.

Note that these figures and ranking are updated nearly daily at Technorati, so if you read this in a couple of days, the numbers will probably have changed.

Note for Justin: you should claim your blog!