ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_050606

Forum Nokia starts blogging

Yup, Nokia's developer guys have also started a blog, aimed squarely at other developers who are interested in Symbian, S60, S40, Mobile Java, Python and other thingamalingies you can use to torture your poor cell phone with.

I think it's about time - my feeling has always been that Nokia's developer programs have been lacking a lot of the enthusiasm of other platforms. Partly, this is due to Symbian and S60 being so... difficult to work with; partly because cell phones are not seen as mobile computers (Witness the Geek Haven Slashdot, where every new Nokia press release is treated with "but I just want a phone". Bah, near-sighted luddites.); and partly because getting your program on someone's cell phone and getting money wrenched out of the user is just not very easy.

The Forum Nokia blogs won't solve everything, of course, but I like their approach: they're also allowing quite a few other guys, not just Nokia employees, to write those blogs. Makes sense; there's more knowledge outside the company than inside, and this is really about members of a community blogging to other members of the same community, under a corporate umbrella - not a corporate bullhorn feeding pre-chewed items for the press to digest. Now, if I could just figure out which Enterprise blogger category those external guys belong to...

More interesting stuff still to come along - this is beginning to look like a very busy week.