Says Ramya aka IdeaSmith: "Blogging on the phone has no extra baggage that blogging on a computer carries: you don't have to be grammatically correct and your blog post could be just any stray thought."

Twitter, a popular microblogging service abroad, recently introduced an India number Says Biz Stone, Twitter's co-founder, "The people of India are very sophisticated when it comes to using SMS to stay connected."

In Mumbai, Twitter recently inspired a 'tweetup', when Gaurav Mishra, a marketing professional and an "early adopter of technology", wrote out a post saying "Blog meets are so pass&. I want a Mumbai Twitter meet."

Webaroo Inc, which launched the free microblogging service SMS Gup-Shup in India last April, claims to be growing at nearly 4 per cent every day purely through word-of-mouth publicity "We expect users in excess of 20 million before the end this year," says Webaroo vice president Chirag Jain.

Costs are recovered by placing contextual ads at the end of the SMS. MyTo- day MOBS, a microblogging service from Netcore Solutions that took off last July, sees nearly 25,000 people 'publishing' on a daily basis - again, with zero advertis- ing and marketing costs.

"India has the world's third-largest mobile base. If you create services leveraging the mobile as a platform - they will work," says Netcore MD Rajesh Jain.

It's not even just text anymore - phone compames are ringing in an era in which pictures, video and audio can be blogged instantaneously.

Nokia Nseries introduced its 'M-Blog' last year "When blogging began in the '90s, the only way to blog was to get to a computer and upload images, text and video. But not any more," says Vineet Taneja, GTM head, Nokia India.

Reliance has seen a fourfold increase in its m-blog usage since it started advertising the feature last month, to make blogging appear "less geeky" And Sony Ericsson, buoyed by the success of its mobile blogging feature, has recently launched the K660i "for the Orkut generation".