Essentially, moblogging works like this: You join a moblogging system and start snapping pictures with your mobile phone's built-in camera when you're out wandering around. By pushing a few buttons on the phone, you automatically post the shots to the moblog, where they accumulate and people can view them. If you thought blogging was primarily mundane and tedious, wait until you see moblogs and the crazed exhibitionists showing off on them. If they are not showing off themselves, they are showing off their misbehaving friends. And if they are not showing off their friends, they are taking candid shots of strangers and posting them!

Therein lies the rub.

I recently began using the Nokia 6600 phone, with its more than adequate camera. You can take casual pictures with this thing and even make full-motion video clips. Last year, Nokia was the number-one camera seller in the world, beating Kodak and Sony and the real camera makers. One report says these camera phones will hit the 150 million sales mark this year. The implications of everyone having a camera at the ready are mind-boggling. Moblogging is only giving us an inkling of what's to come.

Already there is evidence in Europe that camera cell phones are being confiscated and held in some theaters and performance venues. When people see the "no cameras" and "no photography" signs, they rarely think twice about using the cell camera and ignoring the signs.

TV commercials are already reflecting the same trend in the US. One commercial shows some hapless guy dressed as a pickle. He is advertising or selling something, and his friend takes his picture, since he looks like a pathetic fool. It is then sent around to all the other friends' phones to mock the guy. This is supposed to be a healthy and cool use for this technology. It's sick. In another commercial, some woman sees her girlfriend's boyfriend with food smeared all over his face. She uses her phone to take a quick snapshot, which she sends to her girlfriend to humiliate the man. This is progress?

I know a dozen people with these phones and they are constantly clicking away at everything they see, looking for the embarrassing photo they can send around. If you thought people driving around recklessly while blabbering on cell phones were annoying, wait until this situation gets out of control. You can expect to see pictures from changing rooms, bathrooms, restaurants, casinos.

Japan, where this phenomenon really began, had to pass a law requiring phones to make a loud click when taking pictures. This was mostly because hordes of Japanese males thought it was great fun to take "upskirt" photos on the sly. There are Web sites devoted to this lurid hobby.

If the picture taking isn't bad enough, the maintenance of a repository or gallery adds to the annoyance. People load phone-cam–memory subsystems with baby and pet pictures, and then want you to look at them, creating a kind of boring, but mobile, slide show. When handed one of these picture galleries where I'm expected to say, "She's really pretty," or "How cute!" or "Nice pic," I instead manage to click over to the address book and accidentally make a mess of it. "Oh, geez, how did that happen? Here, sorry!" Yes, I'm a stinker. At least when it comes to this.

The fact of the matter is that these cell phone cameras are a plague. And only a rare person can take a reasonable picture that looks any good when blown up to a 2 by 3 size. The cameras produce blurry pictures no matter what the resolution is. If you want to take pictures, get a camera.

I would recommend legislation to ban these cameras from even being manufactured, but it's too late now. Some will argue that ordinary pocket cameras are not much different. You can carry one around and sneak pictures. I've been accused of being such a shutterbug myself. But the difference is that the phone-cam is like a spy cam. When I pull out a pocket camera, turn it on, and set it up, I'm essentially announcing that I'm going to take a picture, and people can be on their best behavior if they want to be. When I set up a shot with a phone-cam, though, I look at the cell phone as if I were making a call. I then pull up the phone and shoot before anyone knows what happened. I may as well put a camera in a baseball cap and take secret pictures all day. It's about the same thing.

I suspect that this new phenomenon will result in a lawsuit of some sort, and in some venues we'll all be walking through metal detectors because of these phones. Personally, I think they should all be confiscated immediately and crushed by a steamroller in a public square.

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