21st CENTURY COMMUNICATION TRENDS...

Growth of VOIP

Internet phone calls on the rise: -
"A third of people in the US and Europe will abandon phone lines in favor of wireless and broadband telephony come 2009, say analysts Gartner. Broadband telephony is gaining ground among consumers as people become more confident users of their high-speed net connections. It offers a cheap alternative to fixed-line voice calls. By 2009, 70% of voice connections around the world will be wireless, the Gartner report found. This is due to falling mobile costs and greater penetration in countries such as China and India. "


Free phone calls

Voice phone calls to be free within years: -
EBay CEO. "In a few short years, users can expect to make telephone calls for free, with no per-minute charges, as part of a package of services through which carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees, eBay's chief executive said on Wednesday. "


Online bullying

Confronting Bullies Who Wound With Words: -
"The new online dimension of bullying has grown to the point that Scope, a nonprofit group that provides educational services to school districts, convened the Island's first conference on bullying in cyberspace at Stony Brook University on Sept. 28. Five hundred teachers, administrators, technology experts and students from 3rd to 12th grade took part


P2P e-mail

SnapMail: -
"Unlike instant messaging, SnapMail uses peer-to-peer technology and does not rely on Internet servers to send mail within your local network. This makes SnapMail a very fast in-house messaging system that complements your Internet email. All of your messaging can be conducted without fear of accidentally sending mail out of your company


Centralizing everything in your Blog

Project Comet: -
"Community Aggregation: Gives you the ability to create individual blogs and share sections of them with other users in an elegant and customizable way. Multiple Streams: Provides a single place to keep everything that is important to you. A record of your life is created by incorporating streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single customized blog with an identity of its own. "


Instant wireless networks

An instant and mobile wireless mesh network: -
" California-based start-up company, PacketHop, is about to launch a software to enable mobile and instantaneously reconfigurable mesh networks. If you have a 802.11-enabled laptop or PDA, you will be able to send, receive and route data. According to InformationWeek, this could be primarily used by police officers "caught in a dangerous situation that requires teamwork and fast communication."


Dual mode phones

Number of mobile/wi-fi handsets to reach 66m in 2009 - report: -
"Dual-mode Mobile / Wi-Fi handsets will be the key driver to mass consumer adoption of VoIP. By 2009, over 66m Mobile / wi-fi handsets will be in operation, according to a report from market research firm In-Stat".

RSS failing to gain audience mindshare: -
"Nielsen / Net-Ratings polled 1,000 members of its research panel who read blogs. It found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents either never heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or did not know what the technology is used for. The study found only 11% of Web log readers use RSS to monitor blogs"

Growth in Blogs

Visiting the blogs: -
"A new report out by a leading Internet research company has revealed that fully 30 percent of American Internet users visited blogs during the first quarter of 2005", this CNET news article says. According to it "almost 50 million--or one in six--Americans spent at least some time on blogs during that time frame. That's a 45 percent rise over the year before".


IM and SMS popularity with teens

Teens spurn e-mail for messaging: -
"...instant messaging was proving the most popular way to chat with friends. Three-quarters 75% of online teenagers in the US have used IM, the survey found, with personalized features proving popular."


Business Podcasting

Podcasting Sneaks into Business: -
"Paradyne, the networking company, is diving into podcasts for internal communications. "We've seen such good results with podcasts," writes marketing manager Eric Knapp in an e-mail, "that we're thinking of issuing iPods to our entire sales force."


Wiki + Blog + lists

Backpack personal organizer: -
"Backpack's a fun combination wiki, weblog, to-do list and calendar that's featureful but not overwhelming. Make a page that contains check-offable lists, images, dated notes, and files about a project or idea. Link pages and share them with others for collaborative editing. Set up reminders that get sent to your email or mobile device about project deliverables - or to water the plants or pay the rent. Subscribe to page changes in your newsreader, and reminders in your calendar application."

As personal experience we are also using blogs and WiKi for the purpose of our education, and its very interesting when we publish our views and work on blogs to communicate with other people or i can say that to communicate any person who use internet/blogs.