Many of you know Ken Camp, the man behind IP Telephony Demystified (a book which I leaned on as a reference while developing Switching to VoIP) and the personality behind IP Adventures, coiner of the phrase “Digital Common Sense”, and coordinator of the Realtime VoIP Community. This community is growing, and changing its name, to reflect a focus on the broader subject of unified communications. The name of the new community and blog is Realtime Unified Communications. Not quite the same ring as Realtime VoIP, but I think the change in direction is important.

It signals a change in how the thought leadership is changing in our industry. VoIP is a means to an end, a specific way of applying toolsets to facilitate voice communications over IP, and a way of IP-enabling telecommunications. But the revolution that’s occuring presently in the IP communications world breaks the boundaries of VoIP, and people who previously considered themselves “VoIP people”, like myself, are now looking to other forms of IP-enabled media, to other meanings of “convergence” besides voice and data.

Pulver’s increasing and very vocal interest in video is another signal of this expansion in thought leadership. YouTube is proving something: Our industry, our great drive to IP convergence is connecting people in forms which are well beyond the traditional enterprise telephony and systems management disciplines the majority of us hailed from originally. Today, our best and brightest–Alec Saunders, Martin Geddes, Tom Evslin, Bruce Stewart, Andy Abramson, Tom Keating, and others–are shining the light on how humanity is achieving a form of social convergence that is enabled by the invisible network that exists between us. And this is a network that has so much more at work than Voice over IP.

VoIP is just one piece of the converged communications puzzle. Realtime data-networking, wireless convergence, IP-enablement, and increasingly human-friendly media delivery are all playing important parts. But each is a merely an ingredient in the recipe for greater human connectedness, the farther and farther geographical reach of human ideas, faster and stronger social impact for anybody at all who has something to say, and the very democratization of human interaction itself.