Transcript

Randy Resnick: Some of you know me as Randulo, some of you know me as Randy, some of you know me as Zeeek, some of you know me as the guy who has absolutely nothing to sell and nothing to gain coming to these conferences. But I love them. Why do I come? To see you. Even though I missed Kevin Fleming’s brilliant performance today because I was sleeping, it’s still worth the trip.

I’m going to be talking to you today about things that some of you already know about. Would you raise your hand if you have a Twitter account? That would be about 20%, 1 in 5. Is anyone here in the room 33 years old, exactly? No one? Okay, nobody is 33 years old?

Well if you were 33 years old, the year you were born I was setting up a 220mhz repeater. It’s amateur radio. The 220mhz repeater sat on a hill in Los Angeles and wherever I was in the town I could talk on the phone. By the way, there were no cell phones in 1976, everybody realizes that. And we used Motorola walkie-talkies as telephones. It was hooked up to my phone line; I could make and receive calls for free, by radio. This was done with probably $80 worth of surplus gear- a transceiver that operated duplex, so if you had duplex in your car or wherever you were you could actually be speaking as if it were both directions (most people didn’t have duplex, but…).

The point is, why did we do this? We did it as a hobby because I am a Ham in every sense of the word, and Ham is like a shared interest. They shared interest in geeky stuff like amateur radio and how to wind coils and how many turns of the coil and how to build stuff. Even in those days we still used tubes occasionally, but most transistors, and even those things are practically a thing of the past. But why did we get together, also? Shared interests – everybody was starting with that basic thing of being interested in Ham radio, but we were all also human beings. Some people liked sports and would talk about that or get together on that.

The more important things had to do with the exchange of information and if you needed to know how to get a particular part made, and that rings a bell to some of you probably, if you need hardware, you need to find this stuff out, well there was no web in those days so you would get on and say “Does anyone know if somebody makes a particular kind of hardware? Or if not, can I get the plans?” Sort of an open source before open source, in a way. A community effort, exchanging information.

You can also find customers, there’s a pretty wide area – the first example I can think of is someone who was selling Ham radio stuff. We had many people who were on, they were on just like on Twitter or modern group forums. They wouldn’t troll on the things and try to find customers, but if someone asked a question, they would say, “Why don’t you come by the store? We have this piece of gear.”

You could also socialize of course, and that was a huge thing. And it’s a huge thing with today’s social media or social networking. And Twitter, for example, and the many things that will follow Twitter like Friend Feed and other of these types of instantaneous combinations of IM and forums (I like to call them micro-forums) are basically for some people, and particularly the newer people, way to socialize.

I skipped this step. Forgive me, I made this slide. 1996, twenty years later, I actually put together a chat using PHP, the worst possible tool for this, that was in French and people…basically if you know how Twitter works on the web interface – type in a message, refresh, and you never see anything until you refresh on the web client – that’s what I had. 1996. The site is still on, it still works, but of course it’s fallen into the shadow of Twitter, which came ten years later.

Twitter, and I joined Twitter in 2006 because I join everything that comes out ever. Nice thing about software; You can’t do that with hardware, you cannot buy every piece of equipment that comes out to try but with online stuff you can, and with free software you can download. At any rate you’ll notice that between the two slides, they’re identical almost.

By the way, I encourage everybody to interrupt or to interject because I really would like to have this as a discussion rather a speech for the whole time, so shout out or whatever you have to do, if you do have comments. I really seriously would appreciate that.

The shared interest of the same customers, find information to socialize, and I’m going to go into the find customers part in a minute because that’s really what’s more important, customers and information.

Twitter and its eventual replacements and new iterations of this idea of IM, public, and groups and so on, are just going to keep growing more and more.

[cell phone rings]

That sounds like the Windows cash register to me.

[Man in audience asks question].

Randy: I’m sorry?

Man 1: What’s with the BBS?

Randy: The BBS?

Man 1: Yeah.

Randy: I skipped the BBS because the BBS is very similar, it’s a much more serious schematic. I know people exchange software; In fact, let’s see, now we’re talking the early first day of the internet, really, right? And the modem, a few brave souls ran these things. Now anyone with $20 a year can put up a website that does these things, but in those days yeah, having your phone line and modem and BBS, yeah. Very true.

So what is all this buzz about social networking and what is its professional value? Why do we care? And I think you should care. And obviously, as you can see up there, “the internet is too vast or fast to keep track of”. Does anyone disagree with that, by the way? Is there a way that you can keep track of all the stuff that’s going on in the information glut? Not really. Would somebody defend RS7 as a way to keep up? No way. Anyone using Google Reader here or other major online readers? You go away for a few days, and there’s thousand posts when you return in a couple of days. I’ve totally given up. I’ve probably missed about 20,000 posts. And these are things that I’m interested in. So you can’t.

That’s why we need polls of interest and groups. The polls of interest. The idea of polls of interest is yeah, we’re all interested in Voice and that’s great. But some people are interested in Video and some people are interested in Text, and you may not be. So what you want to do is go out and find the people that actually care about these things. Some people are interested in hardware, other people don’t care. Some people care about connecting to pots, connecting to HTM, other people don’t. Some people want media that’s open source, other people are willing to pay or have customers that are willing to pay.

So you need to try to find people who share your interests. And either you try to monitor them and what they say, and by the way, watch your competition, if you have competition. Or, watching your own reputation. These are to me, by the way, some of the most important points about professional use of Twitter. Let’s eliminate the idea right now that you’re going to go on Twitter or any social media and just go on and keep spamming, saying look at what I did and here’s my site. People do that; I call them the media vampires, it’s BS. They’re like spammers and trolls. There’s a percentage of that, but you can avoid it because on Twitter of on Friend Feed or on these other tools, you actually are in control of who you’re watching anyway. And for that matter, on Twitter you also can have a private stream and only have people who you approve looking at what you say. So that if you were running some kind of operation or have a hobby that’s somehow clandestine, you can literally be using Twitter in that way, and not have to worry about it.

Another really really important thing, product feedback. I recently had an experience with DM Ware – anybody use and like DM Ware? I hate DM Ware and I condemn them in the strongest terms because I went on Twitter and asked somebody who had a DM Ware kind of badge and I asked them a question and I said, “Are you a user or do you work for them?” And the person answered me and we exchanged about five messages and his response was (this is I think the executive of DM Ware): “Well, you’re basically the only one that’s had that problem.”

Is anybody here in the service business, and if so, have you ever said that to a customer? Because damn you. You don’t say to a customer, “You’re the only one that had this problem.” Have you ever called your cell company? Have they said that? As bad as they are, they probably wouldn’t use that on you. So anyway, that irritated me, but here’s my point, besides the fact that I don’t like DM Ware and it doesn’t work as well as parallels, if you’re in that universe.

The point is, here’s a company that has a responsible position. If you have, those of you who use Twitter, if you are wearing the badge of your company or if you’re talking about your company, you have to make damn sure that you know what you’re doing. There is a strategy to this. You don’t just go on as a human being and tell people things, because afterwards the person told me, “Well you shouldn’t expect Twitter to be customer support.” Again, “Oh you’re the customer but you’re wrong.” You can’t do that. You’re not going to have any customers after a while. You’re the only person that’s right in the world, or your company. That’s not true. That’s called Microsoft, in fact, and you don’t want to have that, probably.

Most important thing on this slide: trusted source with influence. First of all, you want to become one of those. If you’ve got a product, everything that you say on social media, remember that it’s going to be in Google, it’s going to be everywhere, cache, everywhere forever, basically. So if you’re representing and saying something, it better be good. Think of the presidential campaigns, the recent one in the United States. Every word is scrutinized and everything you say has a value to it.

So if you’re going to bother being on this stuff, and I think it’s well worthwhile and I think if you have a company, big or small, you have to do this, you have to be on there. What you do with it is another story. But if you’re going to start talking about your company, you need to become a trusted source, which means you need to be 100% transparent and honest. And if you need to route customers, if you’re not the one doing the support…The right answer for the DM Ware guy was, call this number or email these people or something like that, and not comment that I’m the only person having this particular problem.

By the way, the reason I’m irritated with them and the reason I keep mentioning that DM Ware sucks today is because three and a half months after requesting the refund they claim you can have, I just received another message saying, “Oh, you requested a refund? Here’s what you have to do,” when I already jumped through all the hoops. Anyway, that has nothing to do with Twitter, but if you’re going to be on, do it right.

I guess a lot of you would be on LinkedIn or, if you’re European, on Xing or however that’s pronounced. Anybody? Many people? Twitter or Xing, either one. LinkedIn? Who’s on Xing, by the way? Because it’s supposed to be more popular and you’re mostly Germans that would be on Xing, or Europeans right? Which is great. I think they’re similar enough that let’s pretend that it’s basically the same idea. Those of you who are not interested in this, I’ll tell you right now I think that one of the main interests of it would be for your next job and not your current job. Is that right? I think so. However, you’ve also got socialization, you’ve got…well I should probably read this live. It’s one of the very first social networks, it’s considered the most legit vessel, it’s got the most serious vibe to it. This is business, we’re not here to fool around and talk about bacon like on Twitter. This is jobs.

There are groups. Now, like Facebook, LinkedIn just started to get really noisy with groups so that if you’re interested in Voipe, there’s probably 25 groups already. So that’s a shame in a way. Although we don’t want a monopoly, the more the merrier, but at the same time, it’s pretty hard to be everywhere at once. So being omnipotent, you can’t even do it on LinkedIn, let alone all of the other networks. But choosing a group and getting into it might be a better benefit to you, depending on what you’re looking for. Probably you’re strategy should be, “What is it I’m looking for?” Answer that question, are you looking for customers, are you looking for mutual help, community? Because I think you can find an open source vibe if you join the right group or if you’re in the right connections on LinkedIn.

One thing that’s really good on LinkedIn, I think maybe the best feature – Olle, help me out on this. Wake up. Have you ever used the questions and answers on LinkedIn? Either way?

[Olle responds inaudibly].

Okay, so you don’t know. [To another man in audience] Oh, you have? What do you think?

Man 2: There’s a lot of people who are faking questions, trying to attract attention, and particularly trying for…

Randy: Really?

Man 2: A lot of the questions I see are trolls trying to lead into some kind of…

Randy: And what area are you in?

Man 2: Telephony.

Randy: Wow. See, I have not noticed that. All I was going to say about this, because we can’t go into detail about every single thing, is first of all, you can go look and see what this is all about. I have asked several questions and I’ve gotten for the most part really really good responses. I’ve never asked questions about telephony because I can just call somebody directly, but just off the wall stuff – maybe an operating system you don’t know well or something. I am, by the way, referring to technology. I would ask technological questions. I’ve gotten each time, because I mean there’s millions of people, four or five answers. And generally at least three of those answers are good. I would say that all the answers are reasonably good and certainly well meaning. Remember that some of these people are trying to get you as a customer or as a consultant or something. But I’ve had a couple of really excellent answers too. And if you don’t know anybody in any particular endeavor that you’re interested in, I think that’s one of the strongest points of LinkedIn. Bottom line on LinkedIn, help others, rate your own knowledge. There’s a whole thing going on there; I don’t know whether it’s good or not, but people do rate your answers.

The other big feature of LinkedIn is the connection through those you know. So it is the most pure form of networking, in my opinion. Whether you actually benefit from that, that’s really hard to tell. I’m connected to a few people who are pretty high up in corporate structures, whereas I’m in a very small company and I do not deal in social networking at my company’s level. In other words, I own our business and there isn’t a kind of tool to have a next job. In fact, I’m dying to retire anytime. Probably will after this presentation. But the connections through people you know, you are able to meet someone, for example. If you really wanted to meet Olle Johansson, because he’s got so many people around him protecting him, Kevin Flemming. Kevin, are you on LinkedIn?

Kevin: Yes.

Randy: Good. So now everyone know, go look for him there. But seriously, it’s not…

[Man shouts in audience].

Randy: Oh my God, you’ve brought the server down.

[laughter]

Randy: Seriously though, if you really needed to get Mark Spencer or Kevin or somebody for DIGIM or somebody from Zola…Zola are you on LinkedIn? Oh, you are. Great. So if you use Zoiper and you say, “I’ve got to talk to him,” and for some reason there’s no other way, if you know someone who’s connected to him, and if you’re in the Voipe world on LinkedIn, you probably will have somebody in common. So what I like about LinkedIn is it’s a good model of the real world. Meaning, I know Olle, I ask Olle, “Do you know this guy Zola, he’s off in this weird country doing this thing?” and he goes, “Yeah, I know him. Here’s his email.” And it’s great for that. I think that’s probably one of the biggest things you can take away.

My advice, if I’m in any position to give advice, would be just to make sure that if you’re going to get into these things, don’t do what I do, which is to fill in like the minimum amount of information. This is your CV so if you are interested in the benefits of LinkedIn, you need to fill all of the information in, truthfully. I have a tendency of being very surreptitious on social networks in that I don’t necessarily want everybody to know everything about me. But in this particular case, you do want that.

Man 3: We do understand why.

Randy: Yeah, please, these obscure Swedish jokes are…Okay, let me see if I can read this, I can’t see it on the screen. Uh yeah, this is the example of LinkedIn, the asterisk’s user group. Anybody in that from here, at all? There we go, two or three people. What do you think?

Man 4: I think I like it. I just signed up.

Randy: The witness is dismissed. Anybody else have any comment on the asterisk’s users group. Tim, are you in that?

Tim: Nope.

Randy: Or any of them?

Tim: Nope.

Randy: Nope? Well, you know here’s how you find…What’s interesting is if you are in the employment market or if you’re looking for someone, and I think this relatively new, the jobs board. By the way, I didn’t look at what’s written here, there may be something embarrassing, I have no idea. The GSM part for asterisk. There’s probably a certain percentage of spam factor, people who are selling. Is there? I don’t even know what’s here, there may be like horrible stuff, but what you do see is asterisk, asterisk, asterisk. What is the best strategy if you have an array of asterisk boxes? Now there is a question where I can wait on the answer. How do you apply staff book? My point is that there is a job board.

Next slide. Right, jobs board. So if you’re in the field, you might want to look at that and see what’s going on, especially…[reads description of listing]…posted seven days ago by Aoda, and this person, CSI, looks like it may be a recruiting organization or something. Hey, this seems to be, at least to me anyway, a legitimate way to watch the job market. Lots of stuff to monitor. Any comments on LinkedIn anybody, at all? No?

Facebook . Okay, well I don’t think a lot of Facebook. It started as a college student thing. It’s huge, that’s the one thing about it. Like Skype , you can’t avoid it. It has a huge footprint. In my opinion, it’s mostly interesting if you want to screw around with people you know and that girl who got away in college, you want to know what she’s doing, whether she’s still married – it’s Facebook, great. But serious stuff, and let me just point out that I talked to Dan Buringer from Free World Dialup – everyone knows Free World Dialup in the asterisk world, right? Free World Dialup, it’s the thing you experimented with and sipped when you first started it, and Dan Burringer and Jeff Holburn put together a Facebook application. I don’t even know what it did. It’s like, does anybody else have this fatigue level in Voipe where you hear this announcement of somebody else who’s either got a new smartphone app that uses sip or somebody’s got a new Facebook app where you can click and talk to your friends. Frankly, I don’t think that their Facebook ap – and they were well positioned, Holter makes noise and people listen – I don’t think their application went anywhere. As far as I know, it didn’t. So that probably says more about Facebook than it does about their app. Facebook can replace…you can put youtube videos and everything, it’s very very noisy. Too much exposure to apps, there’s been virus propagation on Facebook. It may be great, but I don’t buy it is the conclusion. But Facebook is intrusive to me. You have to go the site, but when you do you might find that someone you barely know has bought a scarf for their husband or something. To me it’s lame. So forget Facebook. Totally uninteresting to me.

On the other hand, you’ve got multimedia, which is another one of these things that kind of was great when it first came out and maybe has a lot less impact now. The thing that I do, which is the Voipe Pearsons conference, and I hope to mention that at least 20 more times before I’m done, is a live conference that started with Marc Spencer, who I think was one of the first guests, Olle and Kevin and a couple of other people who are big luminary figures of the community still have not been our guests, but maybe some day they will. We’ve had a lot of interesting people like Lumen Bach and you see that name, but this is a live conference, but there are many podcasts. And one of those is Dan York, who – I can’t remember the name of his podcasts – works for Voxio I think. But what’s important is Dan has the trust of the community, at least a lot of people follow what he says, and when he speaks a lot of people are listening. So Dan would be somebody that’s good to know and if you have something, an innovation – and of course I’d have to add that it doesn’t compete with some central interest of him or his company or whatever, that’s obvious – something newsworthy, you’d want to talk to Dan and you could talk to him either by being on Twitter or I’m sure Dan is on LinkedIn.

There’s something really great about this that we didn’t have before, even with the internet. Let’s face it, after the first days of putting your email addresses everywhere on the web, that went away because of the spam problem. You cannot just be so free with email contacts anymore. There are contact forms and so on. I really don’t know a better way to talk to somebody like a Dan York or many other people – I think Andy Abramson is a name that some of you may know as well. All these people, including myself, have vested interests, in other words there are things that we’re interested in, things that we don’t want. Competition in, in other words we don’t want to do ads for the competition, although I would if they had a conference. But it’s important. We call that the agent of trust. Some people it reach on Twitter. I don’t believe in that particular philosophy. So that’s in the audio level – live conferences and recorded conferences. I recorded a couple interviews, by the way, that you can listen to as well. And then this is another way to keep abreast of what is going on – possibly contact the person afterwards if it’s cool.

Video. I noticed that last year’s Voipe Conference was Asterisk-Tag, and they immediately had all their stuff on Youtube. I think Stefan also published all of their presentations on Youtube, or maybe it was on his site, I’m not sure. So here’s another thing. Like Olle does such a magnificent presentation – your presentation, your video, if it came out, will be on some site, so if you miss Olle’s presentation, which I think I did yesterday, you can see it again.

How many of you’ve heard of Mogulus? Are you a member? Have you used it? Just a test? Mogulus is something really interesting and to give you the quickest example I can think – if I had anything worthwhile to say and we had a nice internet connection and a powerful video machine and a couple of cameras, we could have…Last year, Phil Zimmermann dialed in through an encrypted line, for example, and he was on Skype. But what Mogulus could do is we could have a presenter here in Rostock and I could be doing the video, you can have the slides at the same time with the person on the stage, almost like being there, and then the director or producer of the show can then enable all kinds of camera or audio from anywhere else in the world who’s joined on this Mogulus thing.

If you’re interested in doing video presentations live for any reason and particularly if they are international or in different areas, it’s terrific. It’s really good – the idea is. The bad news is that it’s no longer free, so I think there’s like a $300 a month charge to get rid of the advertisements and have good bandwidth. So you have to have a compelling reason to want to do this maybe for a couple of months. But on the other hand it could be like a tour, and in this economic environment today where people are a little reticent to travel, it might be a good idea. So you can think of Mogulus as kind of a video teleconferencing way.

Everybody probably knows Ustream or Stickam, which are two other ways…We could be using any of those tools today to transfer the entire thing live. The only problem with that is that because we’re in Europe, there’s not enough people in the early part of the day to warrant that. But some day we could do that – for example, planning the last afternoon sessions, Stefan could maybe, from 3:00 on or something, which would be 9:00 in New York.

The fact is that there’s nothing really earth shattering that you need live. And the reason I mention Lumenvox on the end, assuming they still do this, Lumenvox had really an excellent video presentation. They had a library that you could look at video on demand. The videos are a combination of live and slides. Very, very well done. In fact, I would say that maybe Ayersion, Jason, if you don’t already do that, would be a great thing for you guys to do. Are you doing anything with video?

Jason: We do. We do screencasts, bliptv.

Randy: Bliptv is another and I probably should have put that up here. I don’t mean to give you an encyclopedia of knowledge though. Figure out what you need and…yeah?

Man 5: Have you ever heard of iJustine?

Randy: iJustine? Yeah, iJustine is a friend of mine, she’s been on a call a couple of times. Friend in the sense of “Hey, call this number,” and she did.

Man 5: Justin.tv

Randy: Oh, Justin.tv. Justine is the female start that emerged from justin.tv. Yeah justin.tv is the guy who invented the helmet and he used the cell phone to talk to some video live, yeah. That was a phenomenon, yeah. Anyway, if you have a company, write Lumenvox, I think that they’re a reference, you should go see the site. Lumenvox is speech recognition in case anybody doesn’t know.

So we get to Twitter. And everybody is talking about Twitter. Twitter is really the Britney Spears of this whole universe. It can be such superficial, stupid, lame, bullshit, but – wait, is this a family thing? But the fact is there’s a terrific thing in Twitter if you understand what it does and how it works. And again, Twitter will maybe be replaced by Friend Feed or maybe by something totally different, just as the little PHP script that I wrote ten years ago was replaced by Twitter. It was obfuscated by it.

So what we’re looking at here is the webpage. You know, if somebody tells your Grandma about Twitter, she goes to webpage and she’s gone. She out of there. Because it’s totally incomprehensible unless you’re into it or you’re 13 and have a lot of time to spend on that kind of thing. But we are on the VoIPusers account on View, so that’s me, that’s another on of my identities – VoIPusers, plural. So you can see that up here with point. If you’re on Twitter, follow VoIPusers and you’ll know a lot more about what’s going on. Follow Dan York, as I mentioned before. Everybody else who’s on Twitter, I’ll let them toot their own horns. But the point is, unless you know what you’re doing, the webpage doesn’t mean much to you. You can see here that Garrett Smith from VoIP supply – I don’t know how impressive VoIP supply is to the Europeans by the way? Nope, none? VoIP supply is a big retailer – if you wanted one polycomm, one unit, they would be your people. We won’t talk much about them though because they refused my sponsorship offer so, forget VoIP supply.

[laughter]

Randy: Everybody here that you see, hopefully it’s not that clear what they’re saying, but the point is that they’re all people who are interested in VoIP. And they may very well be interested in what you’re doing, whatever it is you’re doing. Why am I on there? Because when we do a conference live we might have – if we’ve got Marc Spencer of someone with a name or a brand name like Lumenvox, I like to tell people, “Hey, five minutes from now, call this SIC URI.” Nice thing about the conference is that the people who don’t know what sip is, we probably don’t want to hear what these people have to say anyway. That would be another conference for people who need to know. But the majority of our audience knows, and what’s good about that is that they don’t have to dial the USDID that would be a phone call for them.

I guess I won’t explain too much of the screen. This is an old screen. There’s 127 people who are actually watching this channel. I know it’s way way more than that now, but at the time there weren’t many. You can always see Olle’s messages because they all say the same thing. Out of office. Right? How do you say that in Swedish? Isn’t that your message and isn’t that what you see on the screen?

Olle: Yeah, that’s the general message that I leave on the screen.

Randy: There you go. And we’re going to get to that…

Olle: I follow the Twitter screen through Jabber, because the web interface is…

Randy: Exactly. And that’s exactly the next thing because you mentioned Laconica, Olle, yesterday? In fact, there’s an error in the spelling. This is Laconica. This is a twirl client. The web interface is pretty much unusable. You’ll probably want to use a client. For some reason, a lot of the Linux world hates Air. Does anybody use Air on Linux? Does it work for you? Is it okay for you?

Man 6: I do use Twitter.

Randy: Okay, yeah. So the thing about air is – you know, Adobe is another one of those names that I have to spit when I say, but the Air thing does come in handy when you want to be, what’s the expression, platform agnostic. That’s a great one, I love that.

Anyway, this is Twirl. And I have a Laconica instance I set up. Laconica, open source, a guy in Canada, Evan, is doing that. It’s great. And it talks to Jabber, which is why Laconica, Jabber, not that great. But it does work. And also it talks to Twitter, which is interesting, because the first thing…And that’s what those arrows mean, so if I say something – here it is, presenting a paper on social networking for VoIP geeks in Rostock, Germany – and you see that our picture, which is on a local instance of Laconica, is transferred over to the Twitter account, which is a different photo. Because I don’t want my photo, as beautiful as I am, on that stream of Twitter.

Anyway, to explain and try to get to the point here, this is a local instance running on my own FreeBSD server and you can run it on Linux or of course whatever you want. And this is a twirl client talking to that server. But we could be pushing up to whatever Jabber uses, what’s the name of that? So that’s how you can interconnect these things. So this is Laconica, this is twitter, they look the same, basically, right? Because they’re on the same client.

There’s a whole list of clients; I think it would be too long to go through the entire list so I won’t, but there’s lots of things and new things come up everyday on clients. In fact, you have to start wondering why – it’d be like if there were a new sip form everyday, you start to get an awful lot of those.

So back to why we care. Twitter and Friend Feed. Communicate with peers, obviously. So this is an IM, it’s yet another way of having an IM and talking to people and chatting with them. Similar to Jabber I guess, if you can do groups and filters and stuff in Jabber, you’re on Jabber, fine. The problem with Jabber is it has a geek factor of about 9 or 10. Even I am not going to install a Jabber server, that’s R8. That’s not something that I would want to do. You can use GTalk or whatever that is. But Jabber is one of those technologies that not everybody is going to want to use, so the big myriad of something like Twitter, like the other word that everybody doesn’t want to hear – Skype – millions and millions of users. These seething, unwashed masses out there who you now have access to and who now have access to you. You may or may not want that, but if you’re in business you may want to get those numbers and be interfacing with those people.

Help them and get help. On our VoIP channel, it’s like IRC. But IRC, like Jabber, again not everybody does IRC. So we need to get the LCD – the lowest common denominator. Talk to the people. And then use filters to keep those unwashed masses – the real people that you don’t want to deal with, you keep them away just by selection. And that’s great because you are in control. That’s the most important thing to know – you’re in control, just like any other IM. You can be busy, you can pretend you’re not there. There’s no presence on Twitter, by the way, which is a big disadvantage, in my opinion.

Big thing though – making announcements. Like I said, when I have a guest, I even talk about that. If we’re going to talk about subjects, if we’re going to call for papers. But the biggie is watching your brand. Of course, you can also send links to blogs and sites. In other words, somebody says, “Oh, I just thought of this post.” Now if you do this in a disingenuous way, like you post something on your blog and say “Look at my blog!” because there’s a name for that. It’s called spam. So don’t do that. But if you want to be a trusted source and you find something really good, like there’s a new release of Zoiper and it does this fantastic new thing – I don’t know is there? Some fabulous new thing, and you may be the first person to find this out and you say, “You know what, you should go to this site because Zoiper now talks to Mars” I don’t know, something.

So in that case you may be the person that’s announcing it and if what you announce is good, you become a trusted source because people look at it. It’s a little bit like the whine world that I work in. A wine critic only gets popular if people sense that there’s an honesty and they also relate to the person’s tastes in wine. Same thing with software right? If someone comes on and is constantly evangeliXing for Windows a lot of you would probably fall asleep, but if they were talking about something that your’e interested in and they see that they’re being intelligent, suddenly here’s a person who you’ve been able to get to know in one direction, and you can put your trust in that person.

Aggregate feeds is important because you can aggregate feeds on Twitter or any of these things. You have an RSS site that nobody reads, your feed of news. Mycompany.com/RSS Feed. You can’t just depend on people coming to your site, because you know what, there are billions of websites today.

So you’ve got to do other things and one of those things is if I have VoIP things – for example, if we post a recording to the archive of the conference on VoIPusersconference.org, the feed is automatically shot into a couple of different things like Twitter. Here’s a quick example, because I didn’t know I was going to be this long, so I’m going to go really fast over this. This is a customer of mine named Burt Hong. He is a wine critic. He has a quarterly publication. The model of his website is paid subscription. He sends it out by the mail, but it could also go into a database which I put together of 43,000 tasting notes. Imagine what it would be like to taste 43,000 glasses of wine, because he did, over several years.

And what we do on Twitter, a lot of people know this man’s name – it’s Allie Manos and his name BurgHong.com. It’s in a very particular, difficult to understand region of wine, Burgandy. So once a week I have a process that runs – it’s CronJob – and it goes in and it looks at the database and says, “Okay, give me a note of wine that is ready to drink either now or earlier.” So every week, we select randomly a note, we kind of blurt it out, with a link to the site.

Now what’s important here is I sometimes analyze these things right down to the log, and what I’ve found is that he actually makes sales. People go, “Yeah, $130. Boom. I’m subscribing to this,” based on his site, from Twitter.

I don’t think I have to say much more about that. The transaction is called a conversion. Somebody saw something, they clicked and they bought it. And what’s great is, in the case of the model of electronic documents, there’s actually no delivery cost at all, except for the cost of the server.

So watching your brand, very important. Here’s a twitter search – if you’re not familar with this, search.twitter.com, this is probably more for American United States Senator stuff, do a search on your brand or on any brand you like. Now we’ve talked a lot about the Seamans S6IIP Telephone, it’s a dex phone, and I did a search on it recently, and we’ve got some exchanges of information. Somebody asked me, “Does it do this?” and I own one, so this is great. I never met this person, plus he’s in Australia, which is time zone that I wouldn’t ordinarily talk to. What else is there here? Same guy, somebody says, “I have the same headset…” Long story short, the search will actually give you, if you’re interested in a particular thing, a terrific flow of information. The challenge here is judging how valid the stream is. After all, I say “Oh, yeah, this is a great phone. It does G7 22,” which it does and it does a great job, I think. But at my age the hearing and the eyes may not be good enough to judge that properly, so you still have to buy the damn thing to find out if you like it. But this is important and Twitter search is becoming one of the most valuable parts of Twitter.

This is Friend Feed, which is like Twitter, and again on sip.com, junction networks. Here’s Andy Abramson, who is a trusted source. He’s Mr. Blog of VoIP. He’s also, as it happens, is paid to talk about a lot of things, so you’ve got to be careful. He actually says here, we love junction networks on sip, but I was a customer before they were a client. At least he states it right there. And again, I didn’t do this because he had commented on it, but it just happened to come up. I said the recent security problems that people were having, due to the fact that they had extension 2002, they had the user name 2002 and the password was 2002, something like that. Well on sip, junction networks has always had a policy to give you the names that are hashes this long, and I would just say Kudos to them.

I think I’m running over here, so I’ll try to go a little faster. Does anybody know about backtype? This is interesting. It’s a blog search. It’s not very readable is it, either. And I am searching of polychom, as you see by the arrow on the top. Also you can get RSS feeds of it. What are we doing this for? We’re doing it for monitoring your brand or monitoring your competitor. Monitoring the success of the S675, maybe Polycomm wants to look at that for the Kirk phones or whatever. But this is really valuable, because there’s a huge number of people that are doing this.

Here’s an example – this is called blogpulse.com. Does anybody not realize how important blogs are by the way? There again, trusted sources. It’s not all people in bathrobes in their kitchen, typing and having coffee. There’s a lot of important things that goes on on these blogs, and that’s true for Open Source and serious security issues. Again, I mentioned Dan York, but he is involved with a very serious body that deals with security.

Man 7: Voice security alliance.

Randy: Thank you. Voice security alliance. Really serious work and again, a trusted source, so I would check that out. However, this thing is comparing three results that I searched for that are actually three names of grapes, because I couldn’t think of anything for VoIP. And these are pretty unique names that are good for searches. So what you’re seeing here is a comparison of the activity on the blogosphere of Mombecks, Mailnough, and Cavernai. So I don’t know if that translates to you. You could do Polycomm, Seamans, and something, or you could do Zoiper and whatever other clients and all other things. Something to try. Try these and see if they are of any value to you, that’s what I recommend.

Here’s another interesting thing about conversion for Twitter and OMB. I believe this example is my wife’s blog. She writes a blog about a wine room called Wine Brands Blog. She wrote a book and the blog is just an extension. It’s a site where she extends the knowledge, keeps it up to date. And if you look at the legend yellow line, as she got on Twitter, look at the progression. There’s an enormous number – I think it’s safe to say that the business of her blog definitely did double after she had been on Twitter for about three months. And this is not because she was blogging the site all the time. It’s because she commented and engaged with people. Did you want to say something?

[Man asks question inaudibly]

Randy: Yeah, that’s for Google Analysis. That’s pretty obvious because if you know Google Analysis, that’s it. And we follow all of our sites. We manage probably about 50 different websites and this is just one of them, but it’s significant and I can see that the Twitter and her blog feed each other. But this would be just as true if you had that you were trying to sell.

Oh, the voipusersconference.org . Something that I’m very interested in. We stream this live, Wednesday and Friday at 12 noon eastern time, which here in this part of Europe is at 6pm. So a lot of people don’t see it because they’re with their families and other excuses that I don’t listen to, but you can also listen to recordings on that site, so please do make a note of that site. You can call in through PSTN if you like or sip, we’re doing wide band G7 22, and a lot of people really like that. We were discussing it yesterday among developers and stuff and I find that it’s really comfortable, it’s nice.

If you’re interested in contacting me, because even though I said I had nothing to sell, I have things to give away. If you’re interested, wherever you are, and you’re in the VoIP universe, please contact me. I don’t have business cards. Just go to the site or find a way to come up to me in a few minutes or something. You can present your company products, we’d love to have you. The only thing that you need to be clear about is you need to be comprehensible. I realize and I understand, living in France for 25 years, if you’re not a native speaker, people tend to sort of look at you funny. In this case, there’s no face to face, so you have to be comprehensible, understandable, on the telephone. That increases if you can call in on the G7 22, on the wide band bridge, which is furnished to us by Zip DX, a great wide band company.

Text is on VoIP Users Conference, so when you’re on the asterisk’s channel of 3node.net, go to VoIP Users Conference. There are people on there all the time. It’s a very cool little sub-community. Sometimes we talk about motorcycles because we’re small enough to talk about other things besides VoIP. But most of the time it’s interesting and people occasionally, out of desperation from being the source of sarcasm on the asterisk’s channel, will come in and ask a question about asterisk.

You can share info on the conference. You can contact professionals and we do have a mailing list, for what that’s worth, if you’re interested. You do have to be engaged in the conference to be interested.

Now I tried a social networking site. We used a ning site and this is no longer www, because I kind of gave up on it. It’s social. VoIP Users Conference. The ning site allowed people to have their own blogs and everything else, but we’re either not big enough community or, what scares me a little more is that VoIP geeks are less social, they’re less aware. And that’s kind of why I’m trying to hammer on these topics because I think that the percentage of people in this group, compared to any other technical group, is much smaller.

And people like Olle – he is not the example. I think he’s the rare person that actually gets this stuff and he’s not an 18 year old with lots of time on his hands. And he doesn’t use it as a toy, so if he’s using this, it’s because he sees that there’s some value to it.

Oh very quickly, del.icio.us When people told me about this, I couldn’t understand why would I want to share my bookmarks with anybody? Well we use it on the conference because it makes a way for me to easily…When we give URLs on the conference, we try to put it into the bookmark at http://del.icio.us/VoIPusersconference . But you can gain in both directions by it. It’s another – it’s a little touchy feely in my opinion.

Alright, Thank you very much. Session archive – go to VoIPusersconference.org for the session archive in the blog format so you can see it. What to do, if you haven’t already joined LinkedIN, if you’re interested at all in a career someday, join LinkedIn and fill it out. Sign up for Twitter. If you’re not on Twitter, try it, but maybe not on the web. Get a client, download and check it out. Use RSS in both directions, as I mentioned, the searches, stuff like that you can read in RSS, but you have already filtered out what you’re interested in. And particularly, note the trusted sources, like I said, and be proactive. Monitor and defend your brand. By defend I don’t mean be defensive. I mean that if people are talking about your brand, make sure that you’re there to answer. And since we don’t have questions or discussion, that’s it.

Anyone have a VoIP question? I didn’t think so. Okay, thank you very much. Remember, VoIP users conference. Thank you.

[applause]