Less Value from Linking?

Louis Gray of LouisGray.com says he detects a decline in the effectiveness of "linking" as a driver of blog site traffic. Taking a look at traffic to his own site, he now finds "traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search."

People seem to be relying more on news aggregators and RSS feeds.

I'd have to agree. On this site, something like 68 percent of visitors arrive from a search engine site, about 23 percent from referring sites and about nine percent direct.

My personal interest in traffic drivers is as a professional journalist of more than 25 years. Since more of what we do is moving to online delivery, with more of the readership on a story by story basis, irrespective of the brand name packaging we used to emphasize, I'm always interested in how the craft of journalism is evolving.

I used to spend more time embedding links and tagging. These days I do so quite rarely. Mostly, I just put up the posts and am done with it. Of course, I've also stopped using instant messaging as well, Skype for calling and just about any other related applications as well.

I find I am too busy to keep testing many new applications; tired of having to adopt new behaviors. I'm even spending lots less time on Facebook.

Of the new things I've tried recently, Lypp, the Web-based conferencing tool, has proven most useful. It is even delightful. There's still a continuous stream of interesting tools. I just have gotten to the point where getting my work done matters more than exploring lots of new apps. Lypp actually helps me get my work done.

Microsoft ResponsePoint SIP Trunking Suppliers Named

Microsoft Corp. has selected Junction Networks as a preferred SIP trunking and gateway service provider for its Microsoft Response Point small business phone system. The Response Point Service Pack 1, generally available now, will feature services from Junction Networks pre-configured for simple account activation and maintenance.

Microsoft also has certified New Global Telecom, which now is accepting customer orders for NGT Digital Voice for Microsoft Response Point. In April, NGT became the first certified, Microsoft recommended service provider offering industry-standard SIP (session initiation protocol) phone services that works seamlessly with Response Point.

Hosted Business VoIP Seats: Long Ways to Go

Ike Elliott over at Telecosm has completed a partial survey of business VoIP seats now in service. It's a tough number to come up with and is not exhaustive. But it is instructive.

The issue some of us have raised is whether hosted VoIP ever will be a business bigger than legacy Centrex was, in which case market saturation could come at about 33 million seats in service.

Ike's respondents do not represent the whole universe, but are instructive. We have a long ways to go before we can answer the question of how big hosted business IP telephony will be.

Apple Yanks 3G iPhone in Canada

Apple has decided not to sell the iPhone 3G in its retail stores across Canada in protest of Rogers price plans, according to AppleInsider. A minimum three-year contract for $60-a-month buys 150 talk time minutes, 75 text messages and 400 megabytes of data downloads. It clearly is an awful deal.

Information Overload

Wall Street Journal contributor Gordon Crovitz, writing about the dangers of information overload, points out that knowledge workers change activities every three minutes, usually because they're distracted by email or a phone call. It then takes almost half an hour to get back to the task once attention is lost.

A decline in our ability to focus is a side effect of the otherwise powerful tools we use to gather and analyze information, Crovitz argues. That has enterprises experimenting with ways to limit interruptions, at least some days of the week, and at meetings.

He argues that "we humans can be slow, but eventually we catch up to the technologies we create and figure out how best to use them."

I have something of an advantage in that regard, as I have very little need for active internal collaboration. I have to spend lots of time doing research, but very little time coordinating with coworkers.

Still, upon reflection, I have taken some steps to limit interruptions. Sometimes I just turn my phones off. For perhaps six months, I have not opened any instant messaging clients, for any reason other than to place a global call using Skype. Even that function, though, now can be dispensed with as I have added VoIP clients for both my mobiles.

That won't be a viable option for lots of other workers for whom internal collaboration is much more important. Still, one reasonable response is simply not to respond to every inbound email. In my case, I simply delete most messages without reading much more than the headers, or sometimes, on my BlackBerry, fractions of headers. On the BlackBerry, just the few characters displayed on the first line of any message is as far as I'll get.

Perhaps that is a severe sorting mechanism, but it does allow for the time I need to think about things, which is the job I have. Overload might be a problem, but it is not a problem without a resolution.

In my particular case, it means RSS feeds always get checked, all day long. So are text messages. Email is fairly often checked, but with very heavy deletion policies. At least for the moment, IMs are not an issue. It simply is a tool I have decided not to use. Again, my concrete situation is different than that of most enterprise users. IM might actually save time in that scenario, because of the presence function.

Really High iPhone Costs in New Zealand

For those of you who tend to think U.S. prices for any broadband service are higher than anywhere else, consider what New Zealand customers will be paying for a 3G iPhone with a one-gigabyte data plan: $185 U.S. dollars a month.

That comes with 600 minutes of talk time and 600 text messages.

Buyers of the least-expensive data plan (costing about U.S. $59) will have to pay $406 to buy an 8 GByte iPhone or $517 U.S. to get a 16 Gbyte model.

AT&T's best pricing plans are reserved for mobile customers switching from other providers. Existing AT&T customers who are not currently eligible for an upgrade discount can purchase iPhone 3G for $399 for the 8 GB model or $499 for the 16 GB model. Both options require a new two-year service agreement. But the $30 a month data plan includes unlimited usage.

In the future, AT&T will offer a no-contract-required option for $599 (8GB) or $699 (16GB).

Users switching from other mobile providers can get an iPhone for either $199 (8 GB model) or $299 (16 GB model), with the monthly data plan of $30. U.S. users on any mobile provider's plan can qualify for the lower device prices if they buy before July 11, 2008.

For U.S. users not already customers of AT&T mobile services, or not eligible for an upgrade, both device and data plan prices are reasonable, compared to other plans offered in other countries.

Impatient at Broadband Adoption Pace? Don't Be

Americans are an impatient bunch, and pundits are even more unforgiving. We tend to want everything now, and seem to tire of complicated problems that take a while to solve. Consider broadband, which continues to be seen as a problem in some quarters. There still are calls to "national action" to fix the problem. History suggests there is no problem to be fixed.

Broadband reached 50 percent penetration of the consumer market in 10 years--faster than any number of other highly-popular consumer electronics innovations that do not seem to require "national action" to fix. The popular compact disk player took 10.5 years to reach 50-percent penetration. VCRs, another popular innovation in its day, took 14 years to reach half of homes.

Mobile phones took 15 years to reach half of homes.Color televisions took 18 years to reach 50 percent penetration. PCs took 18 years to reach half of homes. It is worthwhile to recall that prices for all these products initially were quite high, but dropped dramatically as volume rose.

Technology also seems to be the reason why any reasonable end user will tend to say their choices of devices, services, applications, as well as the prices they pay for those products and services, are measurably, sometimes dramatically lower these days than before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which some contestants deem to be a failure.

Perhaps it is worth observing that end users--consumers and businesses--are far better off today than they were before the Act. That some contestants have fared better than others is undeniable. So perhaps another observation is in order. Despite any failures of the Act, users universally have more choices, more variety and lower prices in just about every segment of communications today, than they did in 1995.

So perhaps what has happened is that technology and open markets have outstripped all the particular policy regimes in a decisive way. It might be fair to say that success has occurred despite the Act. That there are many unhappy contestants is undeniable. But if the objective was an explosion of choices, better applications and lower prices, that has occurred.

That isn't to say a similar outcome couldn't have been obtained under some other set of policies. European regulators have pursed different courses. In a few cases, those different policies have resulted not only in higher broadband penetration, but also have provided higher bandwidth at lower prices. Japan and Korea come to mind.

Still, it probably also is worth noting that both those nations have domestic business cultures quite distinct from those of Europe, Africa, North America, South America and the rest of Asia. State-directed investment plays a significantly different role than elsewhere, and both nations are relatively compact and feature high-density housing. Both those factors, plus state-directed investment, mean both nations can do things that would be difficult elsewhere.

So it is true that U.S. broadband does not have the highest bandwidth or the lowest price among all nations. Those honors are held by small countries, generally with high-density populations (which means short access loops), or vigorous state-sponsored investment. In broadband, as elsewhere, scale makes a difference.