July 2006

For webmasters and developers wishing to promote their Skypecasts on their website, check out the latest update of the documentation, now part of our Dev Zone.

Here's a short guide we wrote to hosting your first Skypecast:

1. Choose a subject for your Skypecast

You can host a Skypecast on any subject you’re interested in, from classic cars to learning Japanese; from how to bake banana bread, to watching World Cup matches together. The more interesting your subject, the more participants you’re likely to have for your Skypecast. If you’re having trouble picking just one subject, don’t worry — you can host as many Skypecasts as you want and it’s totally free.

2. Create your Skypecast listing

Visit the Skypecasts directory to create your listing

You’ll be prompted to enter a title and description, this is your opportunity to sell your Skypecast to the audience, explain why they should join and what you’ll be talking about. You’ll also need to add keywords (also known as tags) to allow users to find your Skypecast by searching the directory. These keywords will also determine which syndicated listings your Skypecast appears in. By entering several relevant words to describe your Skypecasts subject, you’ll help users to find your Skypecast and will also ensure your Skypecast gets the best possible promotion.

Don’t forget to make a note of the time of your Skypecast so you remember to sign in and host it and don’t leave your audience waiting in silence.

3. Promote your Skypecast

Promoting your Skypecast will boost the number of participants you have in your discussion making it more lively and interesting for you and your attendees.

There are lots of ways to promote your Skypecast such as emailing friends, posting your Skypecast in a related forum or even adding a HTML snippet or Skypecasts feed to your website or blog.

4. Hosting and Moderating

You may wish to run your Skypecast as an open discussion or a one-way broadcast with questions and answers at the end. Either way, the Skypecasts moderation tools will help you. Once your Skypecast has begun you can mute or unmute selected participants or all participants from the Skypecasts controls.

Muting participants will help to improve call quality for you and your participants. When participants are muted, they can request the microphone if they wish to speak. You can use chat to ask them what they wish to talk about and then pass them the virtual microphone to speak.

If certain participants are being disruptive you can eject them from the Skypecast.

That's all for the guide fow now. If you have any questions or comments, please visit the Skypecasts forum

Photo attributed to miss_rogue on flickr.com

Yet another Skypecasts exclusive - Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine has published his long-awaited book, The Long Tail, based on his infamous magazine article and popular blog by the same name.

To celebrate the launch of the book, Chris is hosting a Skypecast to let Skype users hear all about the book and his theories on how the world is changing and also ask any questions you may have.

The Long Talk looks at how technology has allowed consumer culture to shift away from mass markets with small numbers of hit products, towards more niche products and markets. This change has been related to the effect of technology and the "infinite shelf-space effect" of new distribution mechanisms such as the internet breaking the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.

To find out more join the Skypecast on July 24 at 1:30 PM (PST) to hear what Chris has to say.

Sunday 4pm UK time, there will be a Skypecast discussion of the basics and inner workings of Skype as well as clever ways to use it for business, family and socialising by the authors of Skype for Dummies.

We've written a great guide to help you promote the Skypecasts you are hosting on your website. It's aimed at webmasters or programmers for now, and describes:

* JSON feeds API
* HTML snippets (coming soon)

Download "Promoting and Integrating Skypecasts"

To make it easier to find popular Skypecasts with lots of people talking, we've added participant counts to Skypecasts listings. Check out what's On Now in Skypecasts.

Do you remember dancing around to MC Hammer, in dangerously oversized trousers? I certainly do. Following the recent story in USA Today that MC Hammer plans to use Skypecasts, we are looking forward to hearing him host more Skypecasts "about issues such as inner-city murder rates, using [his] songs as an entry point."

Skypecast listing, for those of you that missed it: MC Hammer Talks about new digital album

For more Hammer action, check out his blog, Look3X

Photo taken from flickr.com

It's been a while since the last Skypecasts blog post, since we've been slaving away on some new controls for moderators and participants:

Listening:

Waiting to speak:

Speaking:

Hosting:

Hopefully these give you an idea of how the new controls will work. Basically, they're much more integrated to the Skype client, with some big usability improvements. We're planning to deploy these in the next release of Skype for Windows, coming very soon.

Please let me know what you think and ask any questions in the forums.