Nick has bought a dance mat for his X-box.

Could it be that video games will unleash a nightmarish future of socially adept, physically fit teenagers? Ban this filth now!

Nokia are due to showcase their new blogging tool at CeBit. I like the sound of LifeBlog for several reasons:

1. It seems to require little or no effort from the user, and builds on metadata which can be added with no effort (e.g. the time photos are taken). Rather than actively maintaining an online journal, it seems to take data from the handset and automatically publishes it. I'm sure you'll be able to add commentary if you want to, and this automatic publication will no doubt encourage explanatory text, but it seems immediate in a way that weblogs frequently aren't.

2. It blurs the lines between the network and the handset, in much the same way that Google and Napster blur the lines between local and remote storage (why bother downloading documents from another server when you know you can find and retrieve them when you want in future?).

3. Effort has been put into determining where mobile is different from the fixed-line internet; this isn't just another piece of kit that lets you email or MMS pictures onto your weblog (as so many of these tools seem to be). And they've included the idea of mobile phones as places where you can consume content, not just produce it.

There's been a lot of noise recently about mobile-specific domain names - a .mob extension, for instance - which would allow service providers to mark a given resource or site as being mobile specific.

I think this is a terrible idea.

But to stop myself relentlessly shouting about it elsewhere, here's the sum total of my thinking on why it's bad:

1. We can already differentiate services by using a prefix to the domain name: compare www.futureplatforms.com and wap.futureplatforms.com; you don't need a new domain name to do this.

2. Saying a service is "mobile" doesn't tell you anything about which "version" of mobile it is: WAP? XHTML? cHTML? If you plan to automatically determine which version you're going to deliver, that's great: but in this case you don't need a separate domain name. Just hand out "futureplatforms.com" and redirect as necessary.

3. There's an underlying assumption that URLs are relevant to everyday users of mobile services - that in a few years time, we'll all be tapping addresses into our handsets to access sites. Personally, I don't like this: the reach of mobile goes way beyond the reach of the fixed-line internet. People who don't know or care about underlying technology use mobiles every day of their life, and it seems rather arrogant of us (mobile service providers) to expect them to learn about browsers, servers, sites, and URLs in order to get them to spend time and money with us. The mobile internet needs to be easier than the web, rather than apeing (sp?) it on a small screen. Just because the people building the mobile Internet understand URLs doesn't mean that users have to.

So why are we seeing proposals like this?

1. Domain names are a good way of making money out of thin air. Convince people they need to own every possible representation of their name, and keep coming up with new representations (.biz, .ltd, and so on) to sell them.

2. Mobile is where it's at right now in certain industry circles, and being fashionable attracts all sorts of loons (as we saw in dot-com times).

3. This reason's a little less solid: convincing people to access services through URLs (as opposed to portal menus) helps to get individuals thinking beyond the limited portal their operator presents them with, and maybe weakens the operators control over their customers experiences. I'm not completely convinced by this one though - especially as Vodafone (or at least, one bit of Vodafone) seem to be backing the proposal for .mob domains.

By the way, if you're a developer and find typing long URLs into a handset to be a pain, I recommend checking out TinyURL, which works just dandy for mobile.