Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It’s worth reading Andy Abramson’s thoughts on AIM Phoneline.  Essentially, after a little thinking about it, Andy has realized something we all should have seen — AOL has the largest network of Dial-Up POPs in North America.  While MSN moved aggressively into broadband (because they couldn’t beat AOL at dial-up) in the late 1990’s, AOL clung stubbornly to that core business. Today, they’ve got the PRI’s, they’ve got the modems, etc etc etc.  Giving away phone numbers that ride on that network is an incremental cost of, what, 10 cents per month per subscriber?

While everyone else giving away phone numbers is forced to negotiate wacky deals with Native American tribal phone companies in the middle of sparsely populated areas like the Nevada desert, AOL can just wade in and start capturing customers.  Can anyone doubt that AOL will be the new phone company of America?  Is it not obvious that the Voice 2.0 mantra of applications driving value on the new network will be realized first by AOL?

Brilliant.  Abso-freakin-lutely B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T.

Plantronics just announced a new bluetooth VoIP headset for PC based softphone applications.  The kicker?

Voyager 510-USB features multipoint technology to allow users to switch between multiple Bluetooth-enabled devices, including softphones and mobile phones, with the touch of a button.  

I was just discussing this very issue over lunch yesterday.  The fact that my bluetooth headset (a Motorola HS-810) stays homed to just one device is a major shortcoming which the Voyager 510-USB apparently addresses.

Here’s a longish rant on QoS which is making the rounds this morning.  The author’s contention is that QoS is nothing more than a disguised billing model for incumbents. I am not sure I entirely agree, but I certainly do agree that there are simpler solutions than the ones being proposed.  The case for QoS isn’t that the network operators network doesn’t have bandwidth, but rather that the last mile is so poor.  Prioritizing traffic on the routers we all use would solve that problem. 

As seen at VON Europe in Daiwa Securities’ James Enck’s presentation:

Bloglet has been a handy service I’ve been using for several years to provide Saunderslog by email to any who wished to subscribe.  Periodically it breaks, though, and I have to go fix the interaction.  Well, yesterday was the last time.  While at the site fixing the feed, I discovered that the owner planned to shut it down. 

So, as of this morning, I’ve migrated my email subscriptions over to Feedblitz.  It was pretty painless, as I discovered that Feedblitz has a bloglet migration tool which moved all the subscription information.

While I was at it, I migrated all of my feed subscribers to Feedburner as well.  Steve Smith has built a handy Wordpress plug-in that redirects all feed readers to the new Feedburner subscription, without you having to go build arcane .htaccess rewrite rules.  Highly recommended.

And lastly, I pointed my Feedblitz email subscription at Feedburner so I can get consistent statistics, and you can get consistent content.

What does this mean to you, the reader?

1. Better layout.  The Feedburner/Feedblitz combo provides a wealth of tools that let me customize the layout, that I’ve just begun to explore.
2. New features.  Email this, links from technorati, my daily Diggs, and related links from Sphere, to name a few.