Why moblogging hasn't taken off in India?

I was explaining my inquisitive cousin studying in 9th grade what moblogging is all about. He asked me if I do it. I said I don't, but could show him a few who do. I scourged the net to see if I can find some m0bloggers. I could hardly lay my hands on a few mobloggers. That got me wondering why moblogging hadn't caught up so well in India despite the hype surrounding it. Blogging by typing text and clicking photos via your mobile camera and using GPRS to send it to a platform like Blogger to be published seemed quite straight forward. How come nobody was taking it up?

A few clicks and searches on Google led me to this excellent interview of Kiran Jonnalagadda a.k.a Jace conducted by Kiruba Shankar on why moblogging is not taking off in India. And if you are wondering who Jace is, he is one of the few mobloggers in India. The reasons that pop out from the interview are

• Technical difficulties in getting GPRS setup on one's mobile
• Lack of MMS popularity due to low critical mass of users
• The prohibitive costs of good camera phones
• Setting up blogs and access paths from your mobile phones to blogs.
• The associated difficulties of filtering out headers and footers that service providers attach to MMS messages sent.

Not everything is gray though, Jace says. Things are improving in terms of special support from sites like Flickr who are making moblogging a lot easier. Jace has also put together a small program to enable his content make its way from his mobile to his blog without any hitch. Quite a neat blog that he has going, I must admit.