We love the Moblog

(picture taken by teflon at ATP 2008)

Who?

Born and bred South Londoner, mid-20s, now living on the "wrong side of the river" in sunny Harringay (that's Harringay in the London borough of Haringey) via a four year detour in Glasgow.

Career paths I have considered include writer, documentary film maker, zoo keeper, paramedic and archivist. Career paths I have taken include tape librarian, captioner, fast-food waitress and television researcher (for about two weeks). Currently I work for a charity as a website officer - somehow hanging round here and other internet places taught me enough to branch out and escape the tape library! (Although I bet when I post this there'll still be some broken links...)

How long have you had a moblog?

5 years, 3 months and counting. I should have more posts for that time really!

What brought you here?

Distant connections and phone envy. I met Mat through my then-boyfriend Teflon (and Mat's sister Salome), when we happened to be in Norwich for a student tv conference.

He told us all about his new fangled site, and me, a slow moving Luddite brandished my ancient brick of a Nokia at him and said that 'cameraphones would just be a fad' or something to that effect. I know, I know...

Little did I know that after months of waiting patiently on pavements while Tef took photos of interesting things he'd found on the streets of Glasgow, I'd have my very own phone with camera function and be sitting in a dark room by myself, bored at my new summer job... and wondering what harm it could do to get involved...

What keeps you here?

The people. Originally the fact there was a bit of a Glasgow moblog network, but that became less important as I got to know folks.

The humour, the 'c'mon everybody let's put on the show right here' attitude, some amazingly creative use of words and images and crazy puns which I'm never quite quick enough to join in on.

The ability to document and capture pictures and stories that make me laugh or I think are intriguing.


What made you decide to become a Mod?

See above. Over the years I've found the can-do community attitude of mobloggers so inspirational that I ended up working indirectly with webby things myself as a web officer for a charity. Just by hanging round this place I learned loads.

I think the web offers loads of opportunities for communication and Getting Things Done (as well as plenty for procrastination), and Moblog was probably the first site that showed me all online communication didn't have to descend into snarkiness and trolling. When trolls turn up, everyone just takes the piss. I loved that.

So although I am terrified about whether I have the time or skills to be doing ANY of this (and there are a lot of others doing a lot more than me) I figure spending a little bit of my day looking for highlight worthy pics, spam etc is a small price to give back. I promise to be upfront if I really don't think I can keep up anymore. Because now I get paid to look after a site, I know how damn frustrating it is when it doesn't work.

Posted by kel