July 2012 archive

Jul 06

Can You Help? 3rd Annual IPv6 Global Deployment Survey

NRO logoDo you have IPv6 deployed within your network? If so, could you please take a moment to participate in the 3rd annual “IPv6 Deployment Monitoring Survey” on the current and future use of IPv6?

The survey is at:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GlobalIPv6survey2012

The survey won’t take that long and will go far in helping the the Number Resource Organization (NRO) (an umbrella organization for the 5 Regional Internet Registries) understand how the Internet community is moving toward widespread adoption of IPv6.  As the NRO states:

We encourage all organisations to participate in this survey, which we hope will establish a comprehensive view of present IPv6 penetration and future plans for IPv6 deployment. The survey is composed of 23 questions and can be completed in about 15 minutes. For those without IPv6 allocations or assignments, or who have not yet deployed IPv6, the questions will be fewer in number.

The results will be publicly available, as last year’s results are, and will be distributed widely.

Since the time we last wrote about the survey, THE DEADLINE WAS EXTENDED UNTIL FRIDAY, JULY 13th.

If you can spare the few minutes to answer the survey before next Friday it will greatly help the registries – and all of us – understand future trends for IPv6 deployment.  Thank you!

Jul 05

Wow! Dramatic Growth in DNSSEC-signed Domains in .NL

Wow!  Per a tweet from Bert Hubert of PowerDNS we learned of this very dramatic graph of growth in DNSSEC-signed domains in .NL (click on the image to see the most up-to-date numbers):

DNSSEC-signed domains in .NL

That is quite the “hockey stick” jump in DNSSEC usage!  On July 2nd there were around 15,800 DNSSEC-signed domains in .NL and at the time I write this post there are 84,407!

In response to my query about what occurred, Bert said only that a PowerDNSSEC user enabled DNSSEC. Bert was also quick to point out in other messages I’ve seen that this fantastic growth is not exclusively because of PowerDNSSEC but that the PowerDNSSEC team worked hard to make it happen.

According to discussion on the dnssec-deployment mailing list, there are about 5 million .NL domain names. So in just a couple of days the .NL space has zipped by 1% and is fast on the way to 2% of all .NL domain names being signed!

Excellent work by all involved and it will be interesting to see how much farther it climbs!

P.S. I’ll note that just in the past few minutes while I wrote these last couple of paragraphs, the count climbed from 84,407 to 84,913!

Jul 03

Deutsche Telekom Partners With Tropo To Expose Developer APIs for Voice and SMS

Telekom tropo apiIntriguing news out of the folks at Tropo today... Deutsche Telekom has made the Tropo APIs available as part of DT's "Developer Garden" at:
http://www.developergarden.com/apis/apis-sdks/telekom-tropo-api/

This is part of a broad range of APIs offered by Deutsche Telekom and basically gives developers using the DT network access to the full range of Tropo.com capabilities. As they note on the page, you can:

  • Make & receive phone calls from within any web browser or application
  • Run Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) applications with speech recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS)
  • Send SMS out of CRM applications
  • Create conference calls with up to 50 participants

Basically create any kind of "voice mashup" you can think of. I would also note that Tropo supports multiple languages for speech recognition and text-to-speech, a fact that may appeal to European developers.

Now why would a developer want to use "Telekom Tropo" versus just "regular" Tropo? The answer seems to be that DT takes care of all the billing integration and makes it easy for developers to charge for their services. From what I can see, all that billing integration is handled directly by Deutsche Telekom.

Now, obviously, this only works on the DT network, but that network is quite large throughout Europe at around 93 million subscribers.

In reading the Telekom Tropo API Q & A, too, I found an interesting note:

Telekom Tropo is hosted in Telekom data centes in Germany and therefore fulfills the highest European security and privacy standards..

Which means to me that the Voxeo Labs team made it possible for the Tropo server-side software to run directly within a mobile operator's network. This could lead to very interesting business models more where mobile operators could easily deploy Tropo capabilities to their developers as the Deutsche Telekom team has done.

Congrats to the Tropo and Deutsche Telekom teams on this news and I look forward to learning about what developers build now that this capability has been brought into DT's "developer garden"!

UPDATE: BusinessWeek is reporting today that Deutsche Telekom announced a partnership with MasterCard and is in talks with Google - both about adding partners to its mobile payment system.

[Full Disclosure: I was employed by Voxeo from October 2007 to September 2011 and participated in the launch of Tropo.com several years ago. However, I wouldn't write about it if I didn't think what they are doing is cool!]

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Jul 03

Note to PR People: PLEASE INCLUDE A URL With Your News Release!

FACEPALM

Yet again I was reminded today that so many people involved with public relations (PR)[1] simply fail to understand how media works in 2012 - and fail to understand how one simple step could help them help other people tell their story!

As is the case most days, I received another batch of news releases[2], and there was one in particular I wanted to write about... but...

There was NO URL to where the news release was posted on the Internet!

Here's the thing... I write articles on my various sites. In doing so, I like to link to original sources. I'm generally NOT simply going to post your news release verbatim... I want to provide some context or commentary - but I want to provide a link back to the news release for any readers who want to read what the company/organization said.

Usually this takes the form of something like:

blah, blah, blah... As company XYZ indicated in a news release today, they will be... blah, blah, blah...

I like doing this as a way of citing an original source.

But to do this... I NEED A URL!

If you as a PR professional do not include a link to your news release in the email you send me, that means I have to dig for one. I have to go and try to find it on your site.

Odds are with the very little time I have for most of my writing, I'm not going to do that! Unless I am extremely interested in writing about your topic. I'm simply going to move on and write about something else.

Here I am... offering to give you a free link... to send people over to your site. TO SEND YOU TRAFFIC!

And you're missing that opportunity!

Yeah, Dan, but how many people actually read your site, you say? After all, I'm not __<insert name of big site>__.

Well, while my site may or may not send you much traffic, given that you are spamming me with an email you probably sent to a thousand other potential "media", you're potentially missing out on getting easy links from thousands of other people, too!

A Very Simple Recipe

Here's a VERY simple recipe for doing this right:

1. Publish your news release on YOUR site. You do have an area of your (or your client's) site where you post news releases, don't you?[3]

2. Visit the news release web page on your site using your web browser.

3. Copy the web address from your browser. (That would be the "URL" if you don't do geeky three-letter acronyms.)

4. Paste the web address into the news release email.

5. Spam your message out to me and everyone else, because clearly you don't have enough time to do PR correctly and target your messages appropriately.

Okay, step #5 may be a bit snarky... because in truth I've seen messages that have been targeted (and even individually tailored to me) that have still failed to include a URL.

A Bonus!

Here's another tip about why you might want to include a URL. I might not have the time - or interest - to write about your news release today. But I still might think it would be of interest to my "audience" of people who follow my site.

So while I might not post my own article, I might pass along your news via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.

But to do that, what do I need???

That's right... a LINK!

So by you failing to include a URL you're missing a moment when I might, right then, tweet out or post about your news release!

Instead I'll either have to try to find a link (which I may or may not do), or wait until sometime later when I see someone's post about your news.

Either way you lost my moment right then when I might have acted and helped spread your news.

Fix The Process!

Now, when I've asked some PR people why they have failed to send out a link in their email, often the comment is that "it takes a while" to publish the news release to the company/organization's site. They've wanted to get the word out quickly when the news release goes on the wire... and don't want to wait for whenever the company's web or IT team gets around to getting the page up on the site.

So FIX THAT!

This is 2012, people!

If your website is not up to the task of dealing with real-time publishing of content, maybe you need to be asking some tough questions about your site.

Pretty much every content management system (CMS) I am aware of has some mechanism for scheduling content publishing in advance. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, others... they all have it either built-in or available as an add-on. You should be able to get the news release loaded into the website and even get the URL that the news release will be available at. Then, when the news release goes live, you can be all ready to send out your spammy email to everyone pointing them to your site.

You're already loading the news release text into a wire service web interface to distribute it... why can't you (or someone within your organization) also load it into your own site and queue it for publication at a specific time?

This is NOT rocket science or quantum physics.

If the "web team" or "IT team" won't let you load it into the site - or has some other issue making the content available at a specific time or at the very least getting you a URL - well, that is a process issue.

Fix it!

Send me and everyone else a URL to where your news release is posted on your site.

Help us tell your story!

One simple step.

Stop making excuses.

Do it!

P.S. And no, I did not write about that news release I saw this morning because the PR person did not include a URL... and I spent my time writing this rant instead! :-)

P.P.S. And for bonus points, you can even go a step above your other PR peers and have the link you send me also have links to company logos, quotes, photos, videos... other things you might want me to potentially include in my article. It could be a full-blown "social media news release" - or it could just be a set of easy-to-find links in the sidebar next to your news release. Help me tell your story! Make it super easy for me to do... and odds are I will!

[1] When I say "people involved with PR", I do not mean only people at PR agencies. It could be someone on staff or contracting for a company/organization... basically anyone sending out email messages promoting news releases.

[2] NONE of which were actually targeted to me, but rather just spammed out there... but that's another "PR101" topic for another day.

[3] Some people do send out URLs to the news release on distribution services like PR Newswire or Marketwire and while that's at least a link we can use, why send traffic to the distribution services site? Why not send it to your site instead? Where it can be surrounded in your branding and your other links?

Image credit: _maracuja on Flickr

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Jul 03

Slides: SIP and IPv6 – Can They Get Along?

Last week at the SIPNOC 2012 event in Virginia, I gave a presentation about how the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) can work with IPv6 and what some of the issues are around deployment.  I emphasized the fact that SIP works over IPv6 and then took a step back to talk about the basics of IPv6 before diving into more SIP- and VoIP-specific issues.  There was some great discussion and I learned later that a number of people took photos of my slide about SIP and NAT. :-)

To that end, my slides about SIP and IPv6 are now available online for your viewing and/or downloading.  I did record the event on video – and at some point here I’m aiming to publish that to our YouTube account.  Meanwhile, enjoy the slides…

SIP and IPv6 – Can They Get Along?

View more presentations from Deploy360

Jul 01

Flying A Foreign Flag – One Day A Year

Canada dayToday, July 1, here at our home in little old Keene, New Hampshire, USA, we flew a foreign flag from our our front porch.

As we have done on every July 1st since 2002... and probably will do for every July 1st in the years ahead.

You see, today is Canada Day and our 10-year old daughter was born in Canada during the 5 years that we lived in Ottawa, Ontario. Through the beauty of the great relationship between the USA and Canada, she is both a US and Canadian citizen.

So today we proudly flew the Canadian flag to honor our daughter, to honor her birthplace and to honor all the friends we made up there. At something like 5:30am she was softly singing "O, Canada" and we all joined her in singing renditions of the tune multiple times during the day. (In English only, of course, as none of us know French well enough to do that verse, although our daughter is learning French in her school.)

This we all do gladly for her.

Tomorrow, the Stars and Strips will be back on the flagpole... for another 364 days...

Happy Canada Day to all our friends living up north of us... and to our daughter!

P.S. And I hope that any of you celebrating today up North did get a chance to have a beavertail, some poutine, or at least a double-double or some timbits from Timmy's, eh?