Here is a photo of my cat Maggie -- not a very good one, granted, shot hastily with my new cell-phone camera. But it shows how the reporting capabilities of bloggers are advancing. I also carry around a 5-megapixel camera, which takes much better pictures. But it's complicated to post them on the blog. I either have to insert the memory stick into my photo printer at home, and then post from my home computer or e-mail to myself at work, or use the memory-stick slot on my laptop, then post it, e-mail it to work or put it on a portable hard drive. I have to either be at home to kick things off, in other words, or lug my laptop around with me. I was able to send this photo directly from the phone, which I could have done from anywhere, to my work e-mail, which I have access to from anywhere. One glitch is that the camera phone saves photos in a bmp format, and they need to be changed to jpgs for posting. Still, that's progress. If any of you want to play around at being correspondents for Opening Arguments, send your photos to lmorris@news-sentinel.com
If any of you are thinking of joining the citizen-journalist revolution, by the way, you should probably be thinking about a basic blog-reporting kit.
