iSkoot Issue Solved With Blogosphere's Help

PhoneBoy and to some extent Dan York get the gold stars here.

Both are security experts and have a real expertise in Voice. Dan hosts a regular podcast and Dameon does a wide range of blogging. But at heart both are white hat hackers, and what Dameon did in finding the flaw in a released version of iSkoot so quickly was worth its weight in gold.

This is just one more example of how the Blogosphere helps the startup community, whether asked or not.

It reminds me of the time when an former eBay executive said to some bloggers who were only trying to help "I'm not sure if you're reporters, developers or consultants so I don't know how to deal with you" and then repeated the same comment to me in a slightly different way. Basically, shortly after the eBay purchase Skype had a great chance to embrace the blogosphere, but only in the last six months or so has that really happened well, and largely at the direction of their out of house PR agency in NYC and Chaim Hass, who leads it.

Compare that to iSkoot whose team since the moment the first post went up, were engaging with the bloggers and after a first, reply, after some behind the scenes work a few of us to people we both know at iSkoot (as Dameon points out) the real mystery became clear and iSkoot did the right thing.

This is how the blogosphere helps and will continue to do so. Smart companies embrace passion. It's only insecure executives who fear their help.

Bravo Dameon, Dan and Jim. Bravo iSkoot.