Luca Filigheddu came out with another 'Top 30' list of VoIP blogs, this time using Technorati rankings (versus Garrett Smith's list that I discussed previously).  It's another interesting list that highlights various blogs related to VoIP (and interestingly, Skype Journal is #6 on both lists). 

As noted in the comments, though, Luca's list does miss Marc Evans blog. It also misses Voice of VOIPSA.  In fact, here are the Technorati rankings for the three blogs/podcasts to which I contribute that have to do with VoIP:

Blog	Technorati stats
Voice of VOIPSA	Rank: 84,341 (98 links from 33 blogs)
Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast	Rank: 57,369 (150 links from 47 blogs)
Blog.DanYork.Com	Rank: 105,093 (201 links from 27 blogs)

Based on those numbers, all three of those would have made Luca's list if they were included. Now, granted, Blue Box is a podcast versus a blog, although the detailed show notes wind up having more  links in them then some people blog about in a week.  And, granted, I don't always write about VoIP here on this weblog. (Note that I had to search technorati on "dyork.livejournal.com" since that is what people link to.)

Part of this highlights the challenge in deciding precisely what makes up a "VoIP blog". Where do you draw the line?  How do you determine which blogs should be listed?

And in the end, all of the lists are imperfect and represents someone's attempt to categorize blogs.  Why do we care?  Well, partly there's an element of fun to it (and, yes, competition).  Mostly I like lists like these because I invariably stumble upon someone new that I haven't read.  That, to me, is the real value.

Tags: blogs, voip

Garrett Smith over at Smith On VoIP has put together his list of the "Top 30 VoIP Blogs". It's a good list and hits all the main ones I read (and a few that I hadn't). Nice of Garrett to put the list together and I would definitely suggest checking them out.

I'm not surprised to not see my own blog listed as I haven't really been blogging here as much about VoIP lately. Part of that is summer and other activities... a large part is that I'm doing more of my VoIP security blogging over at "Voice of VOIPSA".

And at the end of the day, this is my personal blog that contains whatever I feel like writing about. I write here for me and not necessarily for anyone else (although I'm glad if people find items helpful). It's not focused on a particular topic. I may write about VoIP intensely for a week or two... and then not cover VoIP topics for several weeks. Or I might throw those topics in here and there.

I've toyed with creating a focused VoIP blog... and some day I may yet do that... but there are only so many hours in the day... and as it is there are still way too many stories in my brain that remain sadly left untold.

(In the meantime, do read all the other ones on Garrett's list... they are excellent!)

Tags: blogs, voip

I am experiencing a fascinating dynamic over at Blue Box.  A listener asked me if there was any way that she could receive updates about the podcast via e-mail.  It turns out that for whatever reason her IT department is blocking RSS.  Now we can separately debate the merits of this - or lack thereof (okay, I think it is utter stupidity, to be honest!) - but the fact remained that she was shut out of subscribing and had to check the web site now and then to see if there were new options.  I did some digging in the options available at Feedburner and found out that they promote the RSS-to-email services of either "Feedblitz" or "Squeet".  I didn't see much of a difference and opted for Feedblitz. 

So now, in the upper right side of the Bluebox website under the "Contact Information" header, you can enter your e-mail address and be subscribed to updates.  Since I'm just using the free service, the theory is that every night Feedblitz will look at the RSS feed and send out an email if there are new items in the feed.  If I wanted to actually pay for the service, I can have updates go out at more frequent intervals, including basically whenever an update is made.  In any event, I thought I'd enable this to see if there is interest.

It turns out, the requestor was not alone... with no publicity beyond mentioning it on the website, I've now had seven people join in for e-mail updates.  I just included mention of it in Bluebox Podcast #20 that I'm uploading right now, so we'll see what happens after I mention that.  It will be interesting to see how many prefer the old method to the new...

Tags: blogs, bluebox, feedblitz, feedburner, podcasting, rss

There has been much of a brouhaha being made in the last few days about whether this month's WMF vulnerability out of Microsoft was deliberate or not. (I personally have a very hard time seeing it as deliberate.) The thing I found interesting was in this Yahoo news article where the author wrote:

Microsoft has officially denied Gibson's claims through a blog entry on the Microsoft Security Response Center site.

The article is referring to this entry, where it's not clear to me that Stephen Toulouse is actually acting in an "official" capacity... nor is he specifically denying Gibson's claims... yet it's interesting to see his posting interpreted that way. Just another example of how blogs are changing around the corporate communication channels. Is this blog entry as "official" as a news release? Which is the "official" word of the company? Or are all forms of communication the "official" voice? Or is this blog "official" because it is formally sponsored by the Microsoft Security Response Center? Interesting questions to think about...

Tags: blogs, microsoft

I did submit my weekly report into For Immediate Release this week... in my 5 minutes, I primarily spoke about my unfortunate case of trackback spam which has forced me to turn on moderation over on Blue Box... I also spoke about what it's like these days to browse the web if the Flash plugin inside your browser is broken (i.e. it's not all that good). I just listened to the full show... as per usual it was another great one. Check it out if you haven't already done so.

Tags: blogs, fir, pr

While I will be spending the week in Boston at Fall 2005 VON, I will be also watching what will be posted online as part of Global PR Blog Week 2.0.  As mentioned on the site...

The Global PR Blog Week 2.0 is an online event that will engage public relations, marketing and business professionals from around the globe in a discussion about how new communications technologies are changing public relations and business communication.

What I find interesting is the submission and peer review process that went on and  resulted in this program of publications.  Most of the names will be familiar to regular listeners of For Immediate Release and it does really represent a "who's who" of people involved with PR and the "new media" of weblogs, wikis, podcasts and social software.

Should definitely be some interesting articles coming out this week... (at least, "interesting" to those folks interested in PR and online media/communications)

Tags: blogs, globalprblogweek, pr

Interesting to see Google join the fray with their own Blog Search tool.    Competition for Technorati and IceRocket from the biggest search engine. A few quick sample searches definitely showed that as you might expect from Google, it is fast!  I'll have to make some time to do some comparative searches... but that time is not today...

Tags: blogs, google, search

Lee Hopkins down in Oz has a new blog after he moved off of Blogger.  If you are interested in PR, communications, etc., his blog is well worth a read.  (Lee is also a regular provider of interesting and entertaining contributions to For Immediate Release.)

Tags: blogs, pr

As a writer, I have to confess that I actually deeply miss the days of snail-mail letters and postcards. There is something tangible about a written letter or postcard that is just missing from e-mail. I'll digress on that topic some other time, but suffice it to say that this interest of mine means that I pay special attention to intersections of snail-mail media and electronic media.

Enter PostSecret. As described in this recent article (in PDF) in the National Post, the site is an outgrowth of an art exhibit started back in November 2004. A bit more information is in the original post, appropriately made on January 1, 2005. Some of the comments are also interesting. Essentially, each Sunday Frank Warren posts a subset of the postcards that he has received that have a secret that someone has sent in. (He is planning a book compiling more of them.)

The site itself is quite fascinating. Perhaps part of it is the voyeuristic impulse in all of us.... but the cards are an interesting collection of differences. Some are sad... some are frightening... some are just, well, strange.

Intriguing art project... and I'm not surprised to see the strong response.

Tags: art, blogs, newmedia
Current Mood: intrigued

As I have written here before, I am considering moving to Typepad both for technical as well as credibility reasons. One of the reasons I haven't moved, though, outside of the complete lack of time to actually make the move, is that fact that I have come to really enjoy the offline editor Semagic that I use for this LiveJournal account. It is a wonderful little tool... fast... efficient.... tons of great keyboard shortcuts... drafts... queuing... all in all a wonderful tool.

When I looked at TypePad, my major dissapointment was simply that there wasn't an offline editor. Yes, there's a bookmarklet... but not a strong editor for offline use (that I could find).

So I was intrigued to see the announcement of QumanaLE from Qumana. On the surface, it seems to offer much of what I have now... with support for the additional features that TypePad has (such as Categories). I'll write here what I find as I explore it more.

Tags: blogs, livejournal

I have to believe that IBM's announcement that it will be encouraging it's employees to blog will only continue to add fuel to the flames of the hype around blogs. Personally, I think it's great that IBM is doing this publicly - and their guidelines are quite interesting. It's intriguing to note that they were developed by the folks currently blogging at IBM. FYI, Nevile Hobson has some good commentary on this announcement. It's definitely a wild world in communications right now... I am very interested to see where it will evolve over these next months and years.

Tags: blogs, pr

Knowing that I am an evangelist for new media such as blogs and podcasts, I had someone ask me the other day the proverbial question "should my company have a blog?" They acted quite surprised when I didn't answer with "Of course!" but rather said "Maybe. Maybe not. How well does a blog fit in with your overall publicity plan?" After a reply of "Huh?", we hit a number of different questions:

• Who is your audience? Are you writing this for your existing customers? for new customers? for the larger public? yourself? Who is going to read this thing? If you don't know, don't hit Go until you do.
  
• What are people passionate about with regard to your company's products and services? Is it one specific product? Is it the image? (i.e. is your brand "cool"?) Is it something they do with your products? Is it a geographic area? Figure it out. Start there. Start small. Find a passionate niche and embrace it madly. Feed the passion.
  
• Does your product or service have a natural community of users? It's easier to build a community around a blog if you already have one. Do you have an existing newsletter? mailing list? user group? Can you easily get the word out to your customers/members?
  
• Are you ready for the openness - good or bad? Are you ready to hear what your customers really think? You may not like it. They may tell you that your products stink. Publicly. Where everyone can read it (and will continue to do so - don't forget that Google caches pages). Hopefully everyone loves you and is positive, but if not, are you ready to don the flak jacket and publicly take the hits? And do so in a nice way that wins the critics over?
  
• Will your blog be unique? Are you the only one talking about your industry/company? (such as a tailor) Or are you the 397th blog on your subject? And if so, why will people visit yours over the 396 other ones? Do you have something interesting to say? Guess what, content is king. Once you get people to your site, they will come back only if it looks interesting enough to do so.
  
• Are you prepared to maintain the blog? Don't kid yourself - it is a lot of work - especially if it succeeds in building a community. The blogosphere is full of dead, abandoned blogs that stopped being updated because people didn't make the time. Make the commitment - or don't start. Don't tempt us and then fail to deliver. Get another author if you need to. Just don't let it die.
  
• How does this blog fit in with all the other publicity activities? Do you have an overall communications/publicity strategy? If so, how does a blog fit in? Does it help explain your news releases? Is it coordinated somewhat to your other PR activities? Does your blog (subtlety or overtly) promote your brand? Do you use other media to drive traffic to your blog? Or your blog to drive traffic to those media? Or both?
  
• In the end, why do you want to do this blog? Are you doing this purely because Business Week says you should be concerned about blogs? If so, stop now and go re-read that magazine - because you are probably going to fail. Are you doing it purely for yourself? (That's okay. You are allowed. Hey, you can even take out a vanity domain name.) Or are you doing it to have an actual open conversation with your customers/members?

These are good questions to ask because at the end of the day, despite all the endless hype, blogs are just yet another tool for communication. A nice, new spiffy easy-to-use tool, perhaps, but still just a tool. If you don't understand how you are going to use the tool, it's pretty certain that it won't be as effective as it could be.

Tags: blogs, newmedia, pr