Say Goodbye to ISDN

BT have announced the "Withdrawing of consumer ISDN, as the demand for it has dived with the availability of cheap, fast broadband." the withdrawal will take place later this year.


So where does that leave consumer ISDN users?

As everyone knows broadband can be one faster and cheaper solution, but for those that don't want to go over to net-based alternatives that use the IP protocol what else is there?

As the bigger players start to drop out of the market, for being unable to deliver goods and services competitively, it has left a void for smaller niche ISP's to break into.

One such contender is FreeUKisp, a UK based ISP offering ISDN Alternatives. Simon Wharton, Managing Director of FreeUKisp said "It's allowed our market share to grow as we start to supply where big players no longer can."

For those concerned by the drop in connection speeds, FreeUKisp recommends the Netfury Accelerator, a state of the art internet accelerator that boosts the connection speed of any standard dial up connection.

So many consumers are now left having to look for new ISDN Providers as BT concentrate on making more money and forgeting about there loyal ISDN customers. But where will they go?

Mobile Web

I was having a play on my PDA the other day and I thought I'd have a look to see if websites geared up for mobiles/PDA were better the when I last checked.

I have to be honest and say that I was slightly disheartened by the lack of sites showing good quality content that was changing quick enough for me to bother having a look on the move.

I've previously written about Time Magazine developing a mobile friendly website and I was pleased to see that the BBC have followed suit with:

But after struggling to find any good sites I went to the place where all search marketers begin... yes Google! Google have launched Google Mobile Services.

As you can see from the layout of the search engine it has been stripped to purely functional elements with a new option for Mobile Web (Beta).

I'm undecided by its usage at the moment but as I look around at the new mobiles for sale today, its clear that the devices to support mobile web are selling everywhere and its not going to be long before companies are going to have to take their 'Mobile Web Presence' seriously.

FeedBurner FeedFlare

FeedBurner's FeedFlare Services allows feed publishers to add content to the bottom of their syndicated post with more information about their content. It gives your subscribers an easy way to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish.

FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content. This really is where Feed Optimisation meets Web 2.0
To see FeedFlare in action check out My Feed.

Event Marketing

When is online marketing not just about marketing online? Well in the last week or so I have been busy helping The Manchester New Technologies Institute to market a number of their successful corporate training courses.

The problem I faced was not knowing how to advertise a course? An event that has a specific start and an end date. The usual linking, blog posts and article submissions were all well and good but I wanted to create a solution that would be removed from the web once the course had finished. The last thing I wanted to do was create duplicate content that would be penalised by search engines having a negative effect to the client’s online presence.

The answer has come in the shape of eventful an online events search engine. This site allows users to add information about a range of courses, events and gigs. Affiliated to ping-o-matic the site updates a number of resources with newly updated content taking the legwork out of distributing your event information across the web.

Its early days for this site but I’ll be keen to see how it develops and to see what new sites appear on the back of this great idea.