Mark's Musings on the Telecommunications Industry: The Sport of Blogging

Thursday, October 20, 2005

The Sport of Blogging

I started this endeavor because I thought that my thoughts on the telecom industry were of interest to the industry and often unique. We are an industry of great technical innovation but often lacking in business innovation. Most of the great business innovations in our industry come from industry outsiders that disrupt the status quo. Amazon is a case in point. Jeff Bezos was in finance before starting Amazon. Adam Curry, a disk jockey, is leading the podcasting revolution which will alter broadcasting as we now know it. Our technological innovation enables disruptive businesses to be created, but industry veterans prefer a more evolutionary approach. Christensen proves to us again that disrupters are often outsiders.

Skype is more of a phenomenon and not a disruptive business concept. Skype’s developers realized that they could not turn it into a profitable business so the sold it to eBay. Vonage is using disruptive technology to enable Rich Karlgaard’s Cheap Revolution, but it is questionable whether it is a disruptive business. If they were to merge with a wireless company to overtake business voice service, then they will be disruptive.

What does all this have to do with the title of the article? Nothing. The previous two paragraphs are epilogs to my Vonage articles. I really intended to write about the challenge of having your blog recognized by the public. To date, I have had about 20 unique visitors and I don’t even know if they were interested in my topics. I put META tags in the blog to get search engines and Technorati to recognize me. I registered the URL with Google, and I have been commenting on articles in Light Reading, News.com, Jeff Pulver’s Blog, and other places. Hopefully I will start to show up in search engines. It would be nice to get some links on other sites as well. Maybe Jeff will be kind enough to include me with the other VoIP blogs he tracks. In the mean time, I’ll keep writing and trying to learn the tricks of being recognized by the cyberworld.