I came across this piece (my blog is so book) discussing how T9 is creating new words associations as people are starting linking words that appear from the same key presses in T9 together which otherwise have nothing in common. For instance in London kids are apparently using book to mean cool as it comes up first on the T9. Although, on my phone cool comes first which is probably just me J

However, I now realise I should have called my children Ablysso and Fant? rather than Calypso and Dante as it would help with texting.

I have been a little quiet on the blogging front lately as Will Bamford and I have been working hard to complete the first stage of project we are working on with members of our Universities Geography department.

We have created a version of Locoblog, which we have christened geoblogger, that will allow us to record the journeys to school of 30 children during the course of a week of their journeys to and from school.

No only do we record the route but we have given the children the ability to blog their health status along the journeys together with an concerns about the environment.

The application also provides a twice daily health survey which is sent back to us along with the distance travelled.

We are going correlate their children’s school journeys with local traffic pollution data in the hope that we can make recommendations on the best routes to take and whether the local council needs to consider creating green corridors for such journeys. Here is the kit we have a amalgamated for the project which looks a bit scary all in one place .

The experiment will take place in 1 week periods in each season over the next year with the first one starting next week. I will blog more details and perhaps some preliminary results during the course of the trial as it will hopefully provide some interesting insights in using mobile phones for fieldwork recording and experiences of using this technology with children

Interesting article on the BBC technology site discussing proposed use in India of bi-diesel which is made from a combination plant oils and alcohol to rum mobile phone base-stations. This type of fuel has much less environmental impact than traditional petroleum products and as such seems and ideal solution for countries where power is a problem.

Nice to see the mobile industry is doing its bit to help minimise our carbon footprint