Jaume de Marcos at his new blog UU Without Borders notes the UUA International Office is hosting a “Skypecast” — a multi-user audio chat using the Skype voice telegraphy software. I’ve never gotten much out of Skype personally, but if the bandwidth holds among the various participants, this might be a useful communication mode.
I continue to wonder if a form of keyboard-based chat might be a helpful if untapped tool for meetings where the participants are scattered over very far distances, as seen in Linux development communities.
Thanks for quoting and the link! Skype is most useful for international PC-to-phone calls, because rates are amazingly cheap. I also wonder about the audio quality of a skypecast. Although one-to-one conversation are usually of good quality, my experience with more than 4 participants in a single conversation is poor quality and unwelcome screeching, but that was with a regular multiuser call, and the skypecast mode may work differently. We’ll see.