Well whether we like it or not Christmas is well on its way...

It has become something of a moblog tradition to celebrate with an advent calendar.

As far as possible we like to use new contributors, so if you haven't contributed in the previous two years and would like to play your part in this year's moblog Advent, please email me viv@moblog.co.uk.

If you don't I may well email you - I have a list!

Thanks to Twiglet for the image :)

Firstly, thanks to everyone who's entered the Caption Competition so far. Photo entries for the competition are now closed but please keep adding your captions for your chance to win a 6 month Moblog subscription and T-shirt.

Secondly, we'd like to say a warm welcome to The Leeds Guide, who have recently joined Moblog. To launch their blog they're inviting you to submit your favourite views of Leeds to their group blog here. They'll be publishing selected photos in the magazine and will be picking an overall winner who will receive a rather nifty Polaroid Pogo Printer, 6 month subscription to the magazine and a coveted Moblog.co.uk T-shirt! To enter, submit print resolution photos (max 20mb) to leedsguide@moblog.co.uk along with your name and your reasons why you love Leeds.

Lastly, we've been noticing a number of you making preparations for Halloween. We'd love to see your costumes and party photos and have revamped an old group for this festive season. If you'd like to share your photos there, pop on over to www.moblog.net/halloween

We'd like to say a massive congratulations to Alfie whose Bus-Tops proposal for the "Artists Taking The Lead" project has been selected as one of 12 commissions of public art across the country by the Arts Council and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. We're really pleased for him and are looking forward to seeing the project develop.

Well done Alfie!

To follow the project visit http://moblog.net/BusTops/ and for more information you can view the website here.

It's Caption Competition time at Moblog!

We're offering you the opportunity to win a six month subscription to the site as well as one of our original moblog.co.uk T-shirts.

To be in with a chance of winning one of these super prizes, pop over to our Caption Competition group and join up today.

To take part, we'll firstly need you to submit some inspiring photos. Once we have these, we'll then need you to put your brains in gear to come up with some entertaining captions.

We'll be awarding the top prizes for the best captions and giving out T-shirts for the photos that inspire these captions - so, put your thinking caps on, set your cameras to 'click' and get posting today!

The competition begins tonight and will end 18th November.

This is our first competition for a while, but we intend to bring you more over the coming months, if you have any ideas for competitions for the community please feel free to post them here.

Nokia are looking for people to hack objects they love with their new N900 phone, the most powerful 'internet tablet' they have ever released.

They're looking for enterprising individuals and teams to use the Nokia N900 & new Maemo platform (which replaces Symbian) to hack objects they love to into functional gadgets, works of art or simply objects of curiosity.

Wish to join a Moblog team or enter the competition with your own team? Submit an image of the much loved object you would hack with a Nokia N900 and enclose some text detailing your idea and we'll help you work out how you could build it. Then, submit the idea to Nokia and if you win, they'll provide help to get it built and paraded around the world!

You can see a quick video of the N900 hacks they did at London Designers Block event last week here, and also, if you have 10 mins to spare, jc1000000 did an interview with Tinker.it & a demo of N900 hacks at the same event.

Submit your ideas directly to PushN900
competition.

OR get help brainstorming your ideas on the PushN900 moblog.

Picture courtesy of Nokia.

Just to let you know that the decision day for Alfie's Bus.Tops project is only a few days away.

The project was one of 5 shortlisted for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and it is part of a project by 'Artists taking the lead' and is being developed by Arts Council England in partnership with London 2012 and the arts councils of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Essentially the idea revolves around placing 40 monochrome LED panels on the roof's of London's Bus Shelters, creating a networked canvas that absolutely anyone online can use to send messages to the city.

Alfie says:

'What we're doing right now is trying to let people know about the project to try and gather some ideas for how the platform might be used. In our budgeting we've allocated 20 x £2,000 grants to work with people and groups. If you know anyone who might be (or if you are)interested, please do pass the link along or add your thoughts.

We've also made the entirety of our final project plan open to public scrutiny. It covers pretty much every aspect of the project as well as a top-line budget summary. For this we're just hoping that people are interested enough to read it and hopefully poke at it and uncover things we might have missed or for which there might be a better approach.

Mobloggers are a creative bunch who are interested in their surroundings and connecting with other people. If the Bus.Tops bid to the Arts Council is successful, I can see Moblog curating a Bus.Tops project slot that explores this concept within our own lives. If you have any great ideas for how we could do this please add your voice to the comments on this post"

What would you create if London's bus shelters became national art canvasses?

For some time, an error in code has been allowing posts from private blogs to be highlighted. This caused two problems. The owners of the blogs were understandably upset as their privacy was not being respected and other users who clicked on the thumbnail to see the post were frustrated and annoyed because the post would not open, due to privacy settings.

We're happy to announce this issue has now been resolved and highlight options have been removed from anyone with privacy settings. This is a short term fix for an ongoing issue and we are striving to devise a strategy to provide mobloggers with more sophisticated privacy options in future development of the site.

We'd appreciate any suggestions you might have with regards to blog privacy and encourage you to post them in the comments.

Thanks to Essitam for the excellent image.

Announcing a new group blog - Photography Competition


If you see a photographic competition that mobloggers might be interested in, please use this group to let everyone know about it.

Thanks to Judo-Jule for just the right image.