The Best Free iPhone Apps for Mobile Bloggers

Don’t be fooled. The phone you’re holding in your hand is actually a tiny computer. With a couple simple (and free!) applications, you’ll never be more than a few taps away from your adoring, blog-reading public.

The widespread availability of mobile broadband has made blogging and micro-blogging ridiculously timely. So timely, in fact, that the term ‘crowd-sourcing’ has been coined to describe mainstream media tapping into this citizen journalism. Any blogger worth his or her weight knows that the early bird gets the link, so what do you need to stay ahead of the competition?

WordPress for iPhone is a free portal to your WordPress powered blog. This app allows for the management of multiple WP blogs and even supports saving local drafts. This app only supports locally saved drafts, though, so you won’t be able to continue writing anything you have saved in WordPress’ own drafts folder. Photo junkies will have to look elsewhere since this is a text only program. Besides these two minor drawbacks, WordPress for iPhone is a very solid effort from Automattic, Inc.

Remember when blogging was fun and not a chore? Tumblr.com does and the excellent Tumble app from BitFire Systems is the perfect pairing to the website. Users are able to post text, photos, chats, links and quotes on the go, right to their Tumblelog. The only thing missing is the Tumblr Dashboard, which allows you to see what your fellow Tumblr users are up to.

TypePad from Six Apart is the little cousin of the popular blogging platform. TypePad for the iPhone is a free app that allows current TypePad subscribers (TypePad is a paid service) to update their blogs remotely. TypePad offers text and photo post options and even the ability to let your readership know you have a new entry available by updating your Twitter account. Nice!

This is by no means a comprehensive list. The app store is filling up with dozens of mobile blogging and micro-blogging applications. The trick is to find one that fits your needs. The apps listed here would be a good place to start.