A trans-Pacific cable could be ready to launch in 2009, connecting Google to Asia and the Pacific while delivering a significant cost savings to the company.

Seventy-five percent of companies estimate that a quarter of their network traffic over the last three months consisted of unified communications-related applications (VoIP, unified messaging, instant messaging), according to a survey from Network General Corporation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent a reminder to AT&T (and the rest of us) that at one time the company resisted government pressure to spy on US citizens, and even publicized it.

Google’s in it for the long haul – the search giant just signed a three-year deal with Network Communications, “the leading publisher of printed and online real estate information in North America.”  At stake?  AdWords.

Last week Google made its move against eBay owned Skype, an online person-to-person internet telephony company, with the purchase of startup company, GrandCentral Communications.

There are a number of questions not readily answerable about this survey, but some of the results make intuitive sense to me at least. The survey was conducted by International Communications Research (ICR) and concludes that customers overwhelmingly prefer promotional messages via snail mail (but that doesn’t mean they are persuaded by them).

Recently, I sat on a panel for PRSA Healthcare on social media. I brought along the PR blogger perspective, and sat on it with the VP at Technorati and Amy Tenderich, from Diabetes Mine.

Healthcare is different from other practices in PR. You have the whole direct-to-consumer guidelines from the FDA, and then you have a ton of other issues in dealing with the press and social media.

Last week, Chicago-based Ragan Communications launched MyRagan.com, a free service aimed at communicators around the world that’s a mix of social network, knowledge and information resource.

It’s captured a lot of imaginations and got off to a cracking start. When I signed up last week, there were about 250 members. Today, that number is over 500.

Also last week, London-based research and training firm Melcrum announced The Communicators’ Network, described as a business-grade professional networking community, that will be launching in June: