I travel frequently and sometimes I have no Internet access but I still would like to blog. My travels are for work mostly and they take me all across the USA and sometimes Canada (Heather I tried to get a trip to Washington state 3 hours from Bellingham, WA and would have driven up to see you if you could have met me over the boarder but it didn't happen. Sorry). Almost everywhere I have telephone access. And I have been saved many times by my phone when I have needed to create a blog post.

You might not know it but your blogging software services allow you to send blog posts in via e-mail. If you are using MMS on your cell phone you can also do this and send that text, picture or video message to an e-mail address. And you can do it without a service plan for Internet access on your phone. I have unlimited picture, text and video messages on my phone plan but no Internet access and I have always been able to send text messages to e-mail addresses.

I use Blogger for a couple of my blogs, Google is not God, and The Wired Kayaker. I use Wordpress for my other two blogs The BenSpark and Read to Me, Dad. Each of those blogs has code in place where I can e-mail blog posts to my blog. So why not do so with my phone? Flickr and buzznet are photo hosting services that I use to I host my photo-a-day images. Both of these sites have e-mail addresses where I can automatically send photos. I used to use a service called Audblog to record audio messages and have them posted to my blogs automatically.

At Blog World Expo I learned about a service called Utterz. This service gives bloggers the ability to create a blog post including: text, audio, video and pictures using just their mobile phone. It combines each of these forms of communication into one cohesive blog post that you can have automatically posted to a number of places like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and to your blog (many of the major blog platforms are represented). You are not limited to just your phone either, if you are online you can use a webcam and microphone and upload an existing image.

But the blog post can be anything you would like it to be and that is the beauty. Maybe you want to express yourself by talking, record an audio post and then quickly send a text to title it, those to things, the audio and the text will match up and can automatically be sent to various places that you designate.

My daily routine of taking a photo and posting it to my blog is somewhat of a ritual in all the pieces that need to fall into place in order to get it done. First off I am always on the lookout for the daily photo. I take it and then construct the day's post around it. Maybe the photo is just something I liked and there is no story surrounding it. Maybe it is the focus of the actual post. Either way the photo is important.

There have been times when I have not had my regular cameras on me when I've wanted to take a photo so I used my camera phone to snap the daily photo. By using Utterz I can quickly post my photo to Utterz with text and a title. Then I make a quick phone call to add audio to the post, and sometimes I get even more ambitious and add video to the post as well.

Other times I take my photo, crop it in photoshop and then write the photo-a-day post for the day. I make a phone call to Utterz to record the audio portion, then I upload the photo and write some additional text, add tags and wait 10 minutes (you have ten minutes to add audio and images together before your autoposting kicks in) for the image to automatically be added to Flickr. I then copy and paste the Flickr text to my uploaded entry on Buzznet (I still post to buzznet because my photo-a-day widget, that many posties have on their blogs, uses the buzznet code.) I also add the image to my photo-a-day set on Flickr and to a couple of groups. I copy the Flickr code for the image and add it to the daily post on The BenSpark.

It might sound a bit confusing and convoluted but it is what I do to do what I do each day. The thing that has greatly enhanced the time it takes to get this whole thing done is the ability to do much of it on my mobile phone. When I have downtime I can start a draft post, save it and wait. Then if I see something I want to have as my daily photo I can shoot it and wait. So, when I finally get a chance to start my little ritual of posting each day I can already be somewhat ready to go.

I'm not saying that Utterz is the only way to go for mobile blogging. However, I know of no other free service that lets you post to up to 14 separate services in one phone call. And you can set up multiple connections to the same services if you would like, so if you had more than one blogger blog, each one could be a separate connection for manual or auto posting. But at the same time your twitter stream would be updated to let people know that you posted a blog post. I have seen many Posties using twitter to let their followers know that they have posted to their blog so I think they would benefit from being about to do that automatically when they post to their blogs.

There are many ways to blog, not all of them involve a computer. Think outside the box and you will become a better blogger and a better Postie. So, sometimes you really should just Phone it in once in a while (Did I mention that I like bad puns).