One of the benefits of following social media is that you come across information that has relevance to mobile ministry, but it doesn’t have to come from major publishers or journalists. Some of the best items found in this space are posted by individuals. And specifically on Twitter, if you follow the hastag #mobmin, you are going to find some nuggets such as Vojo, a mobile blogging platform that extends the Internet beyond just simply having a browser. Here’s more:
Vojo.co is a hosted mobile blogging platform that makes it easy for people to post stories from inexpensive mobile phones via voice calls, SMS, and MMS. Our goal is to foster greater inclusion in in the digital public sphere.
You don’t need a smart phone or an app to post stories to a Vojo group – any phone will do. You don’t even need internet access: Vojo lets you create an account via sms and start posting right away. In addition to content posting via voice, sms, and MMS, and sms registration, features include:tags, geocoding, maps, MMS filters, groups, and group messaging. Group admins can also send sms and multimedia content out to registered users’ mobile phones…
Read more about Vojo at the MIT Center for Civic Media
Now, you might wonder why such a platform or direction might make sense. There are a few ideas that I can think of based on some of the experiences I have with multi-lingual communities:
- Creating a digital notebook/copybook where students post their assignments to this blog, but classmates would be able to see work as well as teachers
- ESL (English as second language) scrapbook
- Digital stories archive for low-tech communities
Of course, there are many other reasons to use a blog. You will want to make sure that if folks are blogging that they have the access to see what they are posting, and an ability to take what’s posted and utilize it to make a jump off for other items. How would you or your organization use a self-publishing platform to emower expressions of faith?
For a listing of other mobile-friendly content management systems, see this listing on our Services page.