Last Friday I did a conference call by Skype with Seth Mazow of Interplast, Norris McDonald of the African American Environmentalist Association and Kim Felton from Northwest Medical Teams. I thought it went quite well. Everyone had some overlapping interests and experiences and communicated well. We didn’t address all of the things we planned to, but I think that was ok.

We did discuss:

• Adding a presence-indicating (available/unavailable) “Skype me!” button to the sidebars of blogs.
• Good times to use Skype and good times to use Gizmo Project (Seth says Skype is better for calling land lines or mobiles – Skype out – in developing countries, otherwise go with Gizmo.)
• Using Audacity to record, edit and turn Skype calls into MP3 format. (Seth’s great idea!)
• Using Odeo to upload recorded Skype calls and to record single voice audio files through the browser.
• How to submit that Odeo channel to iTunes for inclusion in its podcast directory.
• Trying to include a cell phone into an otherwise all four Skype-in conference call crashed the call.
• We discussed the limitations and possibilities of using Skype conference calls.
• We also talked a little bit about how to use Feedburner to watch for unpermitted scraping of your content by other sites – a problem that Seth is dealing with right now.
• And we talked about how to use comment tags to hide code in your blog and leave notes for yourself and others.

All in all I thought it was a good use of time. A little more structure could have been helpful, but I don’t think it was too bad. I’ll put on another one of these calls soon, so keep your eyes peeled. For now though, I’ve got some serious catch up to do. I’ve been doing too many training type activities last week and not enough content production.