Wharton Knowledge focuses on Skype and asks the question of what kind of business it can build.

Although Skype, which provides Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony services and PC-to-PC calling, turns two years old on August 29, it remains unclear what kind of business this relative newcomer will turn out to be. Skype could remain a mere fad for techies, become a next-generation communications platform or evolve into the next eBay or Google.

This is what analyst and commentators have been wondering while the Skype users get on with using it and spreading the news.

Skype has gone from 100,000 users to 47 million in less than two years, largely because of viral marketing. Since starting to use Skype a few weeks ago, Kahn [Barbara Kahn, a Wharton marketing professor and Skype user] has already encouraged six friends to download the software.

Regardless of the business side and the challenges of making Skype mainstream Kevin Werbach considers Skype to be an "underappreciated phenomenon in telecom".

The fact that Skype has grown its usage by so much in such a short period of time without marketing is extraordinary.

There are some interesting points about potential business model, from hooking user on free service and then make them pay small amounts for extra services… It seems to work for Skype at least in my case. I am happy to pay for SkypeOut, a Skype number and voicemail to Skype rather than other VoIP because Skype has already delivered significant value for free and I want them to stick around.

Skype is also looking at video-conferencing to companies and individuals and other services with a high margin. One challenge may be the quality.

Until service is as reliable as regular phone lines, Faulhaber predicts that Skype will be used as a supplement to existing telecommunication services. Werbach, however, suggests that Skype will become part of a stable of services used by customers. And for international travel calls, he adds, Skype may be the leading choice.

I often use Skype for conference calls, it keeps my hands free to look up information on internet while talking to people. Usually, I come across as clearest and loudest of all the participants who are using normal landlines. This makes people wonder and ask what I am using. So the network effect continues…

Yep, another year. I’m trying to be philosophical about it. See, I am smiling. Sigh.

Who’d a thunked it?

Blog visitors are 11 percent more likely than the average online user to have household incomes of at least $75,000, and are also 11 percent more likely than the average Web user to connect via broadband.

I thought bloggers are time wasters, having nothing better to do then blogging about their cats and reading other blogs.. In their pyjamas. And that nobody really cares what bloggers write about.

Something tells me that this should get the marketers’ pulses racing:

The report–authored by comScore Network’s Graham Mudd and DoubleClick’s Director of Research Rick Bruner, and sponsored in part by Gawker Media and SixApart–also found that blog readers visit nearly twice as many Web pages as average Internet users, and are more likely to shop online. According to the report, 51 percent of blog visitors made an online purchase, compared to 39 percent of the all Internet users.

Bloggers brace yer’selves – you’ll have to beat them off with a stick.

Yep, I was there. Just waited for Jackie to blog it, so I could link to it as I knew that her account was going to be mouth-watering. She is, after all, a food blogger. I agree with her account of the place – the food was good and the atmosphere even better. We were indeed treated like royalty but what I really enjoyed was being there with the friends who were the perfect company for a special occassion.

And afterwards, it was the Atlantic Bar for a few Mojitos, fun conversation and some more amazing cigars. Here is a picture documenting the occassion, suitably dark and fuzzy.

And that is exactly what Kamal Aboukhater, the producer of the movie Blowing Smoke, has just done. He has produced the film his way – deeply un-PC screenplay about cigars, men and women using cutting-edge digital technology – and now he is releasing the movie via the Blowing Smoke blog.

So having done all that, getting good people on my side working with me, I didn’t want to become a slave to anyone. I didn’t want to wait for my movie to travel up the long and tedious chain of command until someone finally made a decision to release it.

…There will be no waiting. I can, audience willing, get immediate response and won’t be at the mercy of a movie studio or distributor. One thing I have learned about audiences, thanks to blogs, is that they are not a unified mass of "consumers." They are individuals, choosing something (like what to watch) for many and varied reasons. Some might want to watch Blowing Smoke because they like cigars, some might be drawn to the poker, and others may want their opinions about women and men confirmed. Whatever the reason, now they can do so easily. And, if they feel like it, they can let me know their reactions and opinions.

And he really does not like the studios, but he seems to like bloggers:

Major studios seem to be the last to adopt and adapt to innovation and trends. And, just like with video and DVDs, they are again missing the boat, unaware of the new possibilities for reaching their audiences. They might have caught glimpses of the future, such as Firefly, Global Frequency, and Garden State. This is thanks to a new band of warriors, better known as bloggers, who add strength to the voice of the fans, fighting for more choice for themselves and, in the end, all of us.

The point is that he can go all the way to his audience, by-passing the intermediaries. Sure, the path is not clear, the journey may be either uneventful or too bumpy, but Kamal is aware of the experimental nature of what he has done. He is enjoying the comments from those who understand and appreciate what he is trying to do. As he said after the ‘launch’:

It’s no longer just about the movie but about an opportunity to add another dimension to the infrastructure that’s already there – the blogosphere and the internet.

It has taken a while to get to this point both in terms of understanding and then realising the idea. I feel priviledged to have been part of that process and enjoy working with Kamal whose open mind has been instrumental in this adventure. In return, he can be blamed for my blossoming addiction to cigars, the quality of which would make any cigar afficionado weep with joy. Whilst discussing the final details of the Blowing Smoke ‘release operation’, I savoured a particularly good Hoyo de Monterrey. Who says the days of plotting in smoke-filled rooms are over… I shall leave you with an exhortation: Boxed BS. Available now! Get your own! Oh and, BS download is Coming Out Real Soon Now!

A comment I found on Wirearchy under the post about the New Attention Driven Advertising (Part 2):

That’s the big thing for me with advertising. There’s something really creepy – in a dirty trenchcoat and mismatched socks way – about people who are willing to expertly manipulate others, but not come talk to them as though they were human.

I love it. And the main post ain’t bad either:

There will, of course, be much pushback to tho the growth of online advertising by people who just want to avoid, not have to deal with, the advertising crammed into our eyballs and minds by people who are NOT participating in the interaction available on blogs (for example). I will be one of the people pushing back.

It is not about distrust of blogoshpere commercialisation or some kind of purism. It is about etiquette and respecting the people engaging in a conversation using blogs as a medium. There is another way then interrupting that conversation and ’stealing’ our attention for mind-numbing ads…

In today’s Guardian Jane Perrone writes in Every second a blog – but not for the long slog:

80,000 new weblogs are being created every day. Technorati tracked more than 14.2 million blogs this month, compared to 7.8 million in March.

But the statistics show not everyone who starts a blog stays the course. Although the blogosphere has doubled in size in just over five months, only around half of all blogs are "active" – in other words they have been updated in the past three months – and just 13% are updated every week or more often.

But that does not really matter, does it? As I often point out, talking about blogging as a unified subject is focusing on the format and missing the most fascinating aspects of the phenomenon. It is like judging the success of printing press by the impact the Communist Manifesto, or the Bible or trashy novels, for that matter, have had on the world. And this is actually what happens – there are people complaining about how blogging can be toxic by causing confusion or lack of transparency and credibility(!) and many arguing that blogs are nothing but self-absorbed rubbish at worst and an online version of tabloids in terms of facts and reporting at best, etc etc etc. Even is such objections were true, which they mostly are not, they are irrelevant to the understanding of what is happening with communications and the ability of audiences to connect not only with the ‘broadcasters’ but also with themselves.

My point in the article is that we should not be focusing on the numbers – that is playing the game by the big media rules – but on those aspects of blogging that are truly revolutionary. Self-expression, individual creativity in the public space/domain giving rise to a new online social infrastructure, on top of the technological one.

If you know somebody, how long does it take to know what they are thinking? It’s a long drawn out process. But with blogs it’s the other way around – you meet the person’s mind through their blog.

I see this every day and I myself have found a number of amazing people in a very short period of time. That makes blogging a social activity par excellence. And this is before the pyjamas even come into it.

So what’s the next wave? The next wave is what we’re calling applied technology. The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It’s Web services.

- Fred Wilson in Business 2.0, via What’s Web 2.0?

And this is because the internet is the world of ends…

Escapable logic has a good metaphor and a point:

Around the fire, after a day of grubbing for grubs or dancing between the legs of a woolly mammoth, our ancestors didn’t harangue cavemates about how their new improved spear thrower would jump-start their sex life. You can’t fool anyone around the fire, because you’ve all been doing the same thing all day, your frailties and strengths on display.

During most of our history, there hasn’t been much conversation except camp fire talk, and I’m not sure we accept any talk that doesn’t pass the camp fire test. It’s a tone that’s almost impossible to fake, and it’s certainly the only tone that one willingly endures for more than a few minutes. Camp Fire Talk is part of us, grafted onto our nervous system so thoroughly that speakers stray from it at their peril. We all know what it is and, better, what it isn’t. Blogging is forcing us to remember how to do Camp Fire Talk.

Blogs are so constant and frequent and informal that we’re being forced at last to drop the stridency and expert tone and false eloquence that orators, and their progeny, corporate communicators, have felt obliged to use.

This makes much sense. The balance is shifting because ‘communications’ are becoming it is a two-way thing. The broadcasters are not the only once with the platform, message and the media, the audiences are finding means to talk back and occassionally it’s not a pretty sight. I like the camp fire comparison because it brings out the positive aspects of two-way communication – an ability to have a conversation, revival of informality that can bread credibility.

So gather around the camp fire, put down the clubs and start telling your story…