I PAY AN AVERAGE an average of €250 each month¹ for my mobile phone charges--good news because my charges are declining while my mail2blog productivity is increasing.² I aim to reduce my charges and improve my productivity.
- It is much less expensive to send-only to the blog. I can send two or three items to the same mail server and spend no more than 10 cents.
- Dialing *101# on O2 gives you your current charges.
- The biggest mail2blog day for me was 11 January 2004 with 14 posts from my Nokia Communicator to Irish Typepad. That also reveals another trend: I post most frquently on Sundays but that is also the day of fewest readers because many of my regulars are out walking and shooting photos. They don't get my Sunday blog items, so I am consolidating them into bulk posts.
- The quietest mail2blog day was 9 January 2004. I need to click around an see what was happening in the world that day because my radar found little of value then.
- My follow-up metric (comments, trackback, direct mail) does not suggest that the instantism through mail2blog is compelling. As Robert Scoble surmises and Dave Winer practises, well-formed essays make more impact than snippets or rewarmed news clippings. Essays are about the only kind of content Andrew Orlowski tolerates from bloggers.
- The O2 network does not give dropped call credit for poor data sessions. I survive one per fortnight and they cost three cents each.
- My average anti-spam session when I used my Nokia 9210i to clean up comment spam cost EUR 1.30 and that means I'm spending an average of EUR 24 a month in O2 charges to fight spam.
- Browsing the Internet on O2 GSM is my most expensive mobile phone activity. I do it once a week and it cost EUR 3.13 a session. That has to stop because there's drinking money lost in those browsing sessions--I piss away the cost of a pint faster through my Communicator at least 10 times faster than it takes me to drink a pint of Guinness.
- I spend more in mail2blog each week ( EUR 22.11) than I do on drinks per week ( EUR 19).
- I paid EUR 21.35 to the Irish government to use the mobile Internet in January 2004. I want that money back as community Wi-Fi Internet access.
¹Actual call charges amount to slightly less than EUR 200 per month with the remainder of charges being for tax, insurance and O2 Assistant.
²Mail2blog productivity can be measured by improved publication of multimedia study materials, increasing readership, technorati reach, and rising percentage of comments to blog posts.
Information gleaned from O2 monthly statements.
