There have been some interesting background conversations taking place recently, driven by Garrett Smith's Top 30 VoIP Blogs post. A lot of this conversation has been among the folks listed and some who were overlooked. Luca took a different approach and rather than rank them himself, looked to Technorati rankings as a measure. I was a bit surprised to find that both my personal Digital Common Sense blog and the Realtime VoIP Conversation blog rank in the top 20.

There are some obvious oversights, but that's to be expected in some ways. Phoneboy did a great job of identifying why, for example, Technorati rankings for his site and Ted Wallinford's might be skewed a bit. Beyond that, rankings are flawed at best. Technorati ranks on keywords, so you'll see different ranking for VoIP, Voice over IP, IP Telephony and unified communications depending on how the authors have tagged their sites in the Technorati search engine.

What leaped out at me were really two key points, and I think these are more important than any details about the order of ranking, since those rankings are fluid when everything works anyway.

First, that there are thirty or more VoIP oriented blogs that are highly read and of note in their visibility and presence speaks volumes to the importance of VoIP as a technology. This exercise in looking around at who's talking about VoIP demonstrates to me that VoIP isn't a niche technology. We have achieved mainstream critical mass in terms of awareness and criticality to both business and personal users. I think that implies that VoIP has achieved sustainable momentum and proves it's around for the long haul.

The other thing I noted was the caliber of the company I keep in that light. The individuals listed represent some of the keenest business and technical minds I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Every single person listed in that group is someone I consider to be articulate, thoughtful, and a consumate professional. To me, the caliber of people writing about VoIP also speaks to the maturity and viability of VoIP overall. It's a group of people who collaborate and interact, and even when there is disagreement, really does promote sharing knowledge and information about VoIP, whether it be services, technology, the business of VoIP or future vision.

It's a group of colleagues I'm very proud to be a part of.


Technorati Tags: VoIP, blogs, Technorati, rankings