BRAINS: Blog Rendering and Accessing INstantly System Jenq-Shiou Leu, Member, IEEE, Yuan-Po Chi, Shou-Chuan Chang and Wei-Kuan Shih
Abstract A blog (shortened from ‘weblog’) is a trendy way to share personal journal with others in the cyber world. Traditionally rendering and accessing blogs are normally conducted at a stationary PC. However, such a scheme hinders blog users from writing and reading blogs timely. A short-lived idea came out and passed away suddenly. To facilitate the instant blog updating and retrieving, we combined cellular messaging (SMS/MMS messaging and MMS/WAP push) and Open Sources (Blosxom and Apache) to develop a novel system for the Blog Rendering and Accessing INstantly (BRAINS). BRAINS enables blog users to note down their whims and share interests anytime and anywhere. Blog journalists can utilize their mobile phones in hand to compose and deliver blogs to BRAINS by SMS and MMS messaging at their pleasure. Through pre-registering on BRAINS, readers also can get the up-to-date blogs or notification immediately by MMS push or WAP push respectively. With pervasive networks, BRAINS makes mobile blog rendering and accessing more evident. Index Terms Blog, SMS message, MMS message, WAP push, Instant Messaging
I. INTRODUCTION
B
logging is a modern way to keep diaries online. A large proportion of blogs consist of frequently updated, chronologically ordered on-line journals. Through Internet, bloggers can share their everyday lives, thoughts, and preoccupations to others and blog readers can post back their comments and ideas online. The number of blogs is growing fast from a handful in 1998 to 2.4 millions [1,2] and has become another popular Internet media. In the past, producers and consumers in blogosphere write and read blogs at stationary PCs. Such a mechanism restricts online journaling from being conducted and accessed timely. However, a short-lived idea always comes out and passes away suddenly and the event always goes like a flash in the pan. Lacking for mobility and instancy causes to miss delivering and receiving just-in-time blogs. Based on above, we developed a
Jenq-Shiou Leu is with Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Kuang Fu Rd, Sec.2 HsingChu, Taiwan 300 R.O.C (phone:+886-4-23502900 ext. 5222, email:
[email protected]) Yuan-Po Chi is with Division of Mobile Services, MOBITAI Communications, o. 12, Kung 9th Rd. Taichung, Taiwan 407 R.O.C (email:
[email protected]) Shou-Chuan Chang is with Division of Mobile Services, MOBITAI Communications, o. 12, Kung 9th Rd. Taichung, Taiwan 407 R.O.C (email:
[email protected]) Wei-Kuan Shih is with Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Kuang Fu Rd, Sec.2 HsingChu, Taiwan 300 R.O.C (email:
[email protected]) 0-7803-9182-9/05/$20.00 ©2005 IEEE.
novel system for the Blog Rendering and Accessing INstantly (BRAINS) to enable blog users to note down their whims and share interests anytime and anywhere. To do so, we combined instant messaging (e.g., MSN, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, and so on), email, cellular messaging (SMS [3] /MMS [4] messaging and WAP push [5]) and Open Sources (Blosxom [6] and Apache [7]) to develop BRAINS that keeps and shares bloggers’ thoughts. bloggers who travel from site to site use camera-phones for instantly zapping blog messages within live images and captions back to BRAINS via SMS/MMS messages. Similar to “Service Indication” and “Service Load” in WAP, the expectant blog readers can register to be intrigued by the “Blog Indication” (BI) by instant mechanisms, such as IM, email within a URL or WAP push from BRAINS. Furthermore, they can retrieve such blogs immediately by “Blog Load” (BL) by email with a full blog content or MMS push. As expected [2,8], blogs can be updated with photos and short captions, and sent directly from handheld devices with the convergence of cell-phones, PDAs and cameras. BRAINS realizes “thinking and sharing anytime and anywhere”. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the architectural overview. Section 3 illustrates the system components in BRAINS and depicts the functionality of each component. Session 4 shows the comparisons between the traditional blogging system and BRAINS. Session 5 presents the time cost analysis. Concluding remarks are finally drawn in Section 6. II. ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW The system overview of BRAINS is shown in Fig 1. Not only stationary PCs, bloggers can use cellular phones to compose and send their blogs to some specific service ID in the first place. In the second place, blog messages may fly through two networks: Cellular network (GSM and GPRS networks) and IP networks (IP LAN and Internet) and target BRAINS. Furthermore, BRAINS notifies or delivers the incoming blogs to blog readers according to the registration profiles for each subscriptor. Finally, blog readers can use their handsets and PCs to retrieve blogs.
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B. Blog Adapter Blog Adapter (BA) is responsible for spliting up the multimedia contained in the received messages from SMS/MMS Message Receiver as well as storing the individual media, such as video, image, and text, in Blog Container. BA accommodates each medium to the web pages. For instance, while a blog message with a large image is coming, BA can shrink the image to fit in with the identical size of web page. C. Blog Container Blog container (BC) plays a important role to store and manage all incoming contents from BA. Normally, a blog carries an specific subject or topic, hence BC categorizes the incoming blogs by relevance and lays in contents in different folders according to the distinct subjects. Additionally, Blog Container triggers an event to Blog Reader Register for the new coming blog.
Fig 1. Architecture overview
D. Blog Visualizing Agent Unveiling all contents in blogs is the major task of Blog Visualizing Agent (BVA). The blog readers can navigate what topics or subjects they are interested in via Internet or cellular networks. BVA is implemented by use of the Open Source Blosxom[6] as its core. Blosxom is a lightweight feature-packed blog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability, a flexible function for customizing especially. In other word, Blosxom is extensible via a lot of added-on modules. It is why Blosxom is selected as the core of BVA. In fact, the core of agent includes one template assembler and several templates of web page to render blogs dynamically. Such templates include various parts - header, content part, foot part, and so on. The template assembler put these parts together to form whole web pages.
III. SYSTEM OVERVIEW BRAINS is mainly composed of six modules as shown in Fig. 2: • SMS/MMS Message Receiver (MR) • Blog Adapter (BA) • Blog Container (BC) • Blog Visualizing Agent (BVA) • Blog Reader Register (BRR) • Blog Delivering Adapter (BDA)
Fig 2. System overview of BRAINS
A. SMS/MMS Message Receiver This module is responsible for receiving all incoming blog messages from GSM and GPRS networks. Two significant sub-modules - SMS Message Receiver and MMS Message Receiver connect to SMSC and MMSC respectively to receive incoming messages. The former one links up with SMSC via SMPP [9] over IP. The latter one communicates with MMSC via MM7 interface [4] over SOAP/HTTP/IP. All messages targeting the specific service ID for blogging are conveyed from SMSC/MMSC to such a receiver, and then delivered to Blog Adaptor to be further processed.
E. Blog Reader Register Blog Reader Register (BRR) accepts the subscriptions of blog readers and allows the readers to designate different best-fit delivering modes, such as Instant Messaging (IM), email or MMS/WAP push. Based on access instancy, BRAINS provides two types of blog access to blog readers. Such two types are defined as follows: • Blog Indication (BI): Blog readers always receives a prompt before connecting to a URL to blog content page, for example: WAP push. • Blog Load (BL): Blog readers are directly led to connect to a URL without user intervention, for example: MMS push. When some new blog arrives, BC triggers an event to BRR. Then BRR checks the reader profiles in the registration repository. By invoking the Blog Delivering Adapter, the blog can be notified or delivered according to the registration profiles of the subscibers. F. Blog Delivering Adapter Blog Delivering Adapter (BDA) is responsible for converting delivered contents or notifying message into different formats according to different delivering carrier capabilities and then conveys transformed information to the end blog readers. BDA can support different kind of carriers
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like Email, and WAP/MMS push. With the plug-in feature, BDA can be easily reinforced to support new coming different carries by the integration of opened APIs. Table I illustrates the comparison of different blog delivering carriers. TABLE I COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT BLOG DELIVERING CARRIERS Instant Email MMS/WAP Messaging Support Blog Indication (BI) Support Blog Load (BL) Notification format External Servers
YES NO *Proprietary *IM Server
YES YES MIME SMTP Server *e.g., Jabber, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, ICQ, and so on. ** Push Proxy Gateway
YES YES SOAP/WML WAP PPG** MMS Server
G. Processing Flow The generic proessing flow can be depicted as the sequence diagram shown in Fig. 3 and descibed as follows.
IV. ANALYTICAL COMPARISON Compared to traditional blogging platform, BRAINS features multiple access modes extending from fixed PCs to mobile handheld devices. Secondly, the integration with the cellular messaging and MMS/WAP push supports high mobility, instancy, ubiquity and identification of bloggers. Thirdly, the modularization of BRAINS can make the future interfaces more easily fit it with. Multiple rendering and accessing modes reinforce the influential coverage from a defensive scale – 1×1 (PC to PC) to an offensive one – M×N (Multiple Composers to Multiple Receivers). The major differences between the traditional blogging system and BRAINS are depicted in Table II. TABLE II COMPARISONS OF TRADITIONAL BLOGGING SYSTEM AND BRAINS Traditional Blogging BRAINS System Rendering and Accessing Mode
Mobility Instancy Blog Notification Identification of bloggers Accessible Networks Extensibility
PC-to-PC
Low Low No Hard
PC-to-MS (Mobile Handset) MS-to-PC MS-to-MS High High Yes Easy with Cellular Caller ID Fixed + Cellular Internet High
Fixed Internet Low
V. TIME COST ANALYSIS
Fig 3. Sequence Diagram for Processing Flow
1.
PC-to-PC
Blog readers need to pre-register their delivering modes – IM, email or WAP/MMS push and blog access instancy types – BI or BL on BRR. 2. Blog journalists can render their blogs by their handheld handsets and then post the composed blogs in SMS/MMS messages to some specific service ID anytime and anywhere. 3. MR receives the incoming messages and then forwards them to BA. 4. BA adapts such messages and stores them into some folders in BC. 5. BC issues an event trigger to BRR. 6. According to prior registration in the repository, BRR activates a “notify” or “deliver” command to BDA. 7. BDA converts the delivered blog contents or notifying messages to fit different carriers and sent them to the end blog readers. If the readers receive the BI message in email or WAP push, they can follow the attached URL to reach the final blog content online.
BRAINS offers an instant way to render and access blogs. Therefore, the consumed time of blog delivering and receiving in BRAINS is a sensitive issue. In general, the data transmission in cellular data networks (e.g., 53.6 kbps over GPRS or 384 kbps over 3G for a limited radio resource) is lower than the one in fixed IP networks (e.g., at least 512kbps over ADSL or 10/100Mbps over Ethernet). The consumed time of rendering and accessing blogs over fixed IP networks may be ignored because of the higher transmission rate over cellular networks. To raise the mobility and instance, BRAINS broaches the cellular messaging to blog delivering or blog notifying. The common scenario in a mobile circumstance is composing a blog in a MMS message and delivering the MMS blog to a MMS enabled handset over GPRS. Hence, the total consumed time is 2× Where
SizeB − MMS ×8 seconds. TRGRPS
SizeB − MMS denotes MMS blog size in kbyte,
TRGRPS denotes GRPS transmission rate in kbit/s For example, the size of a MMS blog message is 26.8kbytes and the GPRS transmission rate is 53.6 kbps. The consumed time from posting to being received takes almost 8 seconds.
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[2]
VI. CONCLUSION
[3]
Blogging changes the style of personal journaling from keeping in a conservative diary book to a web page with a public accessibility. Blogs and blog servers have mushroomed in recent years despite of the limitation in rendering and accessing blogs on stationary PC. In this paper, we utilized open sources (e.g., Blosox and Apache) and integrated the instant mechanism from the exiting IP technologies (e.g., IM and email) and cellular messaging (e.g., SMS, MMS and WAP push) to develop BRAINS. With high mobility and accessibility, BRAINS can enlarge the service coverage of blogging from a stationary mode to a mobile mode and extend the influential coverage from the traditional scale - 1×1 to M× N. Fig. 4 shows to compose a blog in a MMS message by a mobile handset and Fig. 5 demonstrates how BRAINS visualizes the incoming blog.
[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Fig 4. Compose a Blog in a MMS Message by MMS enabled Handset
Bloggers’ caller IDs
Fig 5 Blog Message Visualization in BRAINS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank MoBiTai Co mmunications 1 (http://www. mobitai.co m.tw/) for not only financial supporting this research but also offering network resources to aid the research. REFERENCES [1]
http://www.technorati.com/
1 MoBiTai Communications is an established GSM operator in Taiwan. Through its latest projects, MoBiTai has evolved its operational platform to support GPRS (2.5G) services and potentially Beyond 3G (B3G) services in the future.
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