Like a chameleon, Don Tapscott has a gift that lets him adopt to a changing environment. During the dot-com boom, he was an e-commerce expert. When the bubble burst, he turned himself into a corporate governance guru who made transparency his mantra. Now, he's apparently a Web 2.0 expert judging from a promo for a speech he will give next week in Toronto where he will explain why Web 2.0 is "not same buzz surrounding another dot-com bubble. It's a whole new way of doing business online" at a time when "the Internet truly comes of age". Don't get me wrong, I give Tapscott total credit for his ability to jump on the next high-tech trend even it means changing his stripes every few years. After all, Tapscott is a consulting, book writing and speech-giving machine who has a knack for knowing what people and companies want to hear - and doing it in an entertaining way. I went to a speech he gave several years ago just when the Blackberry and MP3 players were just moving into the mainstream. The audience just ate it up as if they were hearing about these developments for the first time. That's Tapscott gift: he consolidates a whole bunch of ideas, and then re-packages them in an informative and accessible way.

One of the my criticisms of Vonage has been the fact many consumers don't want to fool around with installing a router and then try to get all the telephone jacks in their home to work - as opposed to using a base station and cordless phones. Well, it appears Vonage is moving into the home-installation business by offering service in New Jersey and five boroughs in New York City. Vonage plans to expand the service to 50 U.S. cities later this year. This is a much-needed move to get Vonage into the mainstream, although it could be an expensive proposition unless the consumer agrees to pay for the convenience. One of the reasons cablecos are doing so well in cable telephony is in-home service, which makes it easy to get on the VoIP bandwagon. A good example is Videotron, which has signed up for than 160,000 cable telephony customers in the past year. Hat tip to Russell Shaw for picking up the news. By the way, whatever happened to Vonage's IPO? Apparently, the company was poised to make a filing with SEC but it's really, really quiet out there.

For the past couple months, I've been using Blogbeat - a new blog statistics/analytics service. It has been interesting to see the company - led by Jeff Turner - evolve the service with a new look and feel. Not surprisingly, there have been a few hiccups along the way but new users will now find it a very useful tool for bloggers interested in slicing and dicing their traffic in different ways. The big challenge for Blogbeat is getting people to pay for the service - $5 a month or $50 a year - given so many Web 2.0 services are free - probably because they haven't stumbled across a viable business model yet. As for how Blogbeat compares with other services, it's cleaner and more accessible than Google Analytics, which is really geared to people looking to jump-start their AdSense revenue. I have only been only to use the links tool within MeasureMap because the service doesn't support Blogware yet. That said, Blogbeat is easier to use than MeasureMap because all you need to do is drop a small piece of Java script on your blog - rather than having to place code into your footer, comments and post components. I've also tried StatCounter, which is fairly good, although its interface is too busy. So is it worth paying for Blogbeat? For $5 a month, it's a good deal for anyone interested in their traffic - and we all know bloggers are curious about traffic even if they don't admit it.

Update: SolutionWatch has an extensive and positive review on Blogbeat.