ISP Information:
Listening in to a mailing list, message base, chat room, or newsgroup without participating. Newcomers are encouraged to lurk for a while as they
ISP Glossary:
lurk - Pat, please conceal my e-mail address as usual -- and since you'reclosing the thread, I'd just like to add one thing.Apparently some people take exception to my practice of using pressreleases. I would just say this much -- where possible, I usually tryto present the original press release, and it's usually very obviousthat it IS a press release.Very often, within a day or two of the time a press release appears, Isee anywhere from one to several "news" stories which are basicallyattempts to rewrite the press releases to make them look like freshmaterial, and/or hard news.Today, for example, AT&T announced that it was expanding itsCallVantage VoIP service to New York and a few other places. All dayI've been seeing essentially the same story crop up in various otherlocations. And very often it's just a rewrite, or in some cases averbatim lifting of paragraphs from the press release.Now the problem is that press releases do announce what some wouldconsider news. Granted that it is news favorable to whoever issuedthe press release, but it is news nonetheless. If you lived in NewYork City and for some reason had a burning desire to have CallVantageinstead of an arguably better and cheaper VoIP service (from a companylike VoicePulse, Vonage, or Packet8), then it would have been news ofhigh interest to you to know that AT&T was starting to offer servicethere. If you ran a competitive VoIP company, you might also want tokeep track of what AT&T is doing because of the impact it could haveon your own efforts to acquire customers.Much as we might wish it were not so, the story of telecom in generaland VoIP in particular is a story about what businesses are doing.Often that story is told via press releases, some from the companiesthemselves, and some from consumer groups or regulatory agencies, allof which use press releases to tell their side of the story.Personally, if I'm going to get fed information that came from a pressrelease, I'd like to know that up front. It helps me decide how muchcredibility to assign to the contents. If a press release comes froma company that has been known in the past to not deliver what theirpress releases promised, I can factor that in. I do dislike theamount of hype present in some press releases, and if I think it'sreally obnoxious I'll sometimes edit it out. But even there, oneperson's hype is another person's news.Of course, I do try to use news from others sources, too. If someonethinks that "VoIP News" is nothing but press releases, they probablyonly read about three messages and quit. But I can only use what Ican find, and by design press releases are easy to find, so some daysyou will see a few of them.Now having said that, Pat asked me if he could use the VoIP News itemsin Telecom Digest, and I consented. I wasn't exactly prepared forsome of the snide comments that have been made, but guess what, I usedto participate in Fidonet many years ago so I've been flamed by thebest, and you critics aren't even close to being the best. Youwant to add VoIP news items to your killfile, go ahead -- I certainlywould not try to force you to read about a topic that doesn't interestyou. But there are other items that appear here that have littleinterest to me, and you don't see me suggesting that killfiling themis a good thing to do, do you?But the one claim you cannot make is that VoIP news is nottelecommunications news. You might as well be saying that you refuseto read anything about high definition television because you havesome objection to HDTV. You might as well killfile all items aboutnew designs of automobile engines because you're in love with theinternal combustion engine and hope it never goes away. The debate isnot WHETHER circuit-switched telephony is going away -- that isinevitable. The question is how soon it is going away, and whetherwhatever replaces it will be saddled with all the taxes, fees, and"corporate welfare" subsidies currently applied to traditionaltelephony.If some people want to stick their heads
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