SALTforum.org finally gets updated, but still no traffic!

You probably didn't notice it, but the SALTforum.org website finally got updated. Nevertheless, nobody seems to care. (In case you don't remember SALT="Speech Application Language Tags", a markup language Microsoft introduced as an alternative to VoiceXML, but essentially never went anywhere.) The update is a slide deck of a SALT Tutorial given earlier this year at SpeechTEK West. As far as we know this is the first update spkydog has observed since June 2003.

Taking a look at Amazon's alexa.com traffic stats makes for a fairly interesting exercise. Among the Alexa Toolbar Community, SALTforum.org ranks 2,710,256, while the VoiceXML Forum's website (voicexml.org) ranks 328,060. In terms of page views, voicexml.org is attracting several hundred thousand views daily, with spikes exceeding 1 million when newsworthy events occur. There is not enough traffic on SALTforum to even get it on the charts.

Another interesting statistic is that tirst in the SALTforum's "people who visit this site also visit" list is voicexml.org. No trace of the SALT Forum in the voicexml.org statistics.

Just for kicks, I took a look at Alexa's traffic stats for bluetooth.org and compared to voicexml.org. I would think that Alexa.com toolbar users are your typical consumer and since bluetooth is a fairly popular consumer technology these days (does anybody still have a mobile phone without bluetooth?) it would enjoy a fair amount of traffic. Surprisingly, bluetooth.org currently ranks 1,100,715, somewhere in between voicexml.org and saltforum.org. This is surprising because VoiceXML today is primarily installed out of sight in machine rooms (Opera 8's X+V support is one notable exception of course!) and you would think the greater awareness of Bluetooth among consumers would naturally translate into more traffic on a Bluetooth technology site.

Of course, these statistics represent the Alexa user community interests, which may or may not be representative of the wider web audience. If there is a correlation with the wider audience (seems reasonable), then I suppose the SALTforum.org vs. voicexml.org data seems to suggest that SALT is indeed a dead horse. I'm not sure what to make of the voicexml.org vs. bluetooth.org comparison. It seems to sort of suggest that VoiceXML has fairly significant momentum in the industry.

Any thoughts?