Tips

This blog is now obsolete. We will continue to post future Skypecasts updates straight on our [main English blog](http://share.skype.com/sites/en/). If you're reading this with a feed reader, please unsubscribe from the Skypecasts blog feed and [subscribe to our main English blog](http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShareSkypeEn) to receive any future updates.

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

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"

There's some great live content here on Skypecasts, but once you miss it, it's gone... One very common request is the ability for the host to record their Skypecast, and distribute to their audience as an MP3 or podcast.

We've had some discussion on our forums on easy ways to record a Skypecast (or indeed, any Skype call), so that it can be uploaded to your website as an MP3 or podcast. Since Skypecasts does not yet have built in recording, I've summarised the third party software solutions below:

• Audio Hijack Pro (Mac OS X) - Not specifically for Skype, but a general sound recording and editing tool. Here's a quote from our forum: "I use [Audio Hijack Pro] to record our podcast: http://fourguys.libsyn.com or on iTunes under "Four Guys Walk Into a Bar.... AHP lets you incorporate high- and low-pass filters to get rid of ambient noise and hiss. It lets you record in lossless so that you can edit and only downmix to mp3 when finished. It gives you filters to drop the volume automatically if the [Skypecast] is too loud, and (my favorite) it has a plugin that lets you "create" stereo from mono, which gives the sound a bit more depth. All of these are easy to set up and intuitive. It costs $35 but is worth every penny."

• HotRecorder (Windows) - Free trial, or $19.95 to purchase. Another quote fro our forums: "I've had very good experience with using HotRecorder since it records the audio from Skype differently from every other app I've seen out there. I don't quite know how it works, but it only records audio from your microphone in one audio channel (say, the left side of a stereo track) and the audio ONLY FROM SKYPE in the other channel. Quite nifty when recording a conversation with IMs going and everything to have all that other audio not pick up in the recording. They have a free version that records to a proprietary format, but if you purchase it you can convert that proprietary file to WAV format for use in Audacity."

• Pamela (Windows) - New in version 2.0 Professional or Business Edition (from $24.95) is the ability to record a Skypecast, or any Skype call. Pamela is a Skype Certified product.

• PrettyMay (Windows) - New in version 1.0.2.0beta. Pretty May is currently free, according to their website. The developer says: "PrettyMay allows you to record skypecasts simply, and the audio will be saved as mp3 or wav format in separate track which you selected. You can also broadcast audio (mp3 or wav format) in Skypecasts."

If you've had any experiences with these, or other solutions, please let us know on the forum.

Just a reminder that if you do intend to record your Skypecast, it is a legal requirement for you to inform participants that they're being recorded. I suggest putting "(recorded)" at the end of the title of your listing, so it will be shown in the directory before people join, and also in the control window when they are speaking.

For some great tips and help on how Skypecasts works, check out a workshop the Skypecasts team gave to the eBay community in May:

eBay Workshop: Bring Internet Conversations to Life with Skypecasts - May 18

Topics covered were:

• What are Skypecasts?
• Examples of Skypecasts
• Finding a Skypecast
• Participating in a Skypecast
• Creating a Skypecast
• Promoting your Skypecast
• Hosting your Skypecast

We also ran the first ever live, spoken Q&A for an eBay Community Workshop, using a Skypecast. Skypecasts about Skypecasts are cool.

A lot of people have been asking me about viewing listings for Skypecasts in their favourite RSS reader (my personal choice is http://www.bloglines.com). This lets you check out what's coming up on Skypecasts, for topics of interest to you, in a convenient way, alongside your other news feeds or emails.

We have a link on the Skypecasts homepage, which lets you "Subscribe to this page" and receive a feed of Featured Skypecasts. Since Featured Skypecasts are only those from specific partners of Skype, you'll get more listings if you search the entire directory. There's some hidden functionality for the slighty more technical users:

Check out this forum post where I've documented the our RSS feeds:
http://forum.skype.com/viewtopic.php?t=54365

Web 2.0 ahoy!