• Ed on Blog this Chat

  Is this idea dead or does it have legs? This is awesome. IM/VOIP data black holes are one of my worst problems. It's totally whack - we use VOIP/chat for all our projects, and it's where all the really good ideas are,and 1/2 the time I can't find the stuff.
  Can Google desktop even get into the Skype chats?

• Anil on Blog this Chat

  This is a great idea, Phil... there's already scripts to do this with text chats from the popular IM clients, but we're absolutely interested in this kind of integration.

  Separate from the coolness of linking all the different methods of communication together, I'm just glad to see people feeling confortable sending us their suggestions, since we do hear them and take them into account. :)

• Uri L. on Blog this Chat

  Hi,

  First, Phil - thanks for posting this idea here.

  A great discussion has followed this post, and I thought just to drop 2 comments:

  First - the overall context for this screenshot was probably more towards facilitating the content export from skype communications to any KM tools. Be it blogs, wiki's, sharepoint, plumtree, you name it.

  I'm doing around 4 voice conference calls with skype a day. A lot of content goes through the IM window. Quickly moving the necessary parts to other apps can save time. In my case it's specifically to sharepoint.

  Second - "blogging diarrhea", I like this term :) But after all, it's the publisher's responsibility to make his content readable. Somtimes it's useful to leave the entire conversation, and sometimes it's irrelevant.

  last thing, Jirong - your add-in rocks! apparently I missed it until now.
  

• Paul Jardine on Blog this Chat

  Ok, on the one hand it is a good idea to be able to SAVE a chat in some 'bloggable' format, but it imples a whole lot of blog publishing functionality in Skype.

  My major objection would be that it would encourage blogging diarrhea. I don't really want to wade through a whole lot of 'How are you?', 'How's the weather?' just because there is a morsel of interesting content.
  I might pay NOT to have it available! :)

• Lion Kimbro on Blog this Chat

  More than this: You should be able to elect that conversations are public. If participants agree, then the conversation is tracked by anyone in real time.

  You subscribe to people's conversations similar to how you can subscribe to people's RSS feeds. When that person enters a conversation, you hear them and their partners softly in the background (assuming headphones.) You could track multiple conversations by arranging them in space, and then relying on your own brain's abilities to filter in and out different conversations.

  Add speech-to-text capabilities to this system, and index all spoken words in real-time. Then you can search the space of public conversations by keyword. The "search results" are actually a positioning of all the conversations simultaneously around your head. When you find the one you want, cut off all others but that one, and turn it up.

  The participants in the discussion note you as a shadow on the periphery. If you wish to participate, you can knock, and they can let you into the discussion. Or, you can find other shadowy people on the periphery, and start a conversation with them.

  Really, it's shocking that we haven't done this in text form already.

• Jirong Zhou on Blog this Chat

  Well, after a nice sleep. I came to realize that something similar could be done in my Outlook plugin: Avantlook http://share.skype.com/directory/avantlook/view/

  It has chat archiving feature. Here is a screen shot. All I need to do is add blog button to the Outlook toolbar.
  www.zalbazone.com/blog/uploads/200506/chatArchive.jpg
  

• Dominik on Blog this Chat

  Great idea! I mentioned it (Swiss time) during a Skype chat with a friend in China this morning. I would pay $30-40 for this.

• Stephanie on Blog this Chat

  This is a neat idea, and could have wonderful implications for distance education! I like the idea of each person having the opportunity to give permission to have his or her chat published though. If not, it could end up being an all or nothing situation and a potential loss of information sharing. Great initiative!

• Steffen on Blog this Chat

  Honestly said I don't like this idea at all.
  If I am chatting with someone via Skype I consider this as rather private between this(these) person(s) and me and I don't want this conversation to find its way to the public. On the same way you could say "stop encrypting my messages".
  I think it has something of an abuse of confidence.

  And since I can't imagine that too many people would like to use that feature it would get in the way of Skypes "keep it simple" policy.

  If you really want to post quotes from Skype, you should ask for permission, copy a small snippet you want to post and paste it to your favorite blogging tool. And Skype developers could focus on more important stuff.

• Phil Wolff on Blog this Chat

  I posted this in response to Om's post.

  Om, I never said it was a GOOD idea. Just laid it out there. (More ideas at the same batting average = more home runs. Unfortunate side effect: you strike out more.)

  What does the blog this button mean? For bloggers, a common thread in successful design has been cutting the distance between the impulse to post and the “submit” button. So visualizing a “post this chat” symbolizes exactly that.

  Is it feasible? Since there are widely used APIs for posting to blog and wiki servers, I’d think the task would not be difficult.

  Assuming it’s buildable and built, will people use it? In the workplace, blogs are often used as notepads to capture phone notes, meeting notes, task status, schedules, etc. Part personal branding and part knowledge work.

  As more communication takes place in clients like Skype, regardless of the mode, many users will want to repurpose the remains of their conversations. For a personal example, I wish I still had the voicemail my mother left me before she died so I could hear her voice now. SBC deleted it before I had a chance to record it.

  It may look like feature creep or overdesign. Perhaps it is. But blending the Skype client into other communications media builds on the time and social capital people have already invested in social media like flickr or ecademy, and in their personal and team productivity tools.

  Do I think people would pay for that one feature? No. But will blog readers and writers expect that kind of feature as part of a companion product, maybe their blogging tool or their newsreader? Soon.

  Part of the point is that I can’t build a hack for my Vonage account. Or my Yahoo! messenger client. No APIs. I want people to think about how easy it is to build on the Skype client and Skypenet, and what that low barrier to entry means for everyone who’s got a legacy system.

  Craig, thanks for the suggestion to think outside the Skype box. What else would you like us to write about? (I just saw Batman Begins, and I could write about that I suppose.) Skype Journal was started this February so we’re still defining our scope. We’re covering a beat and you’re right: it’s more than Skype. And it’s not all favorable. That’s why, aside from the name, we’re an independent publication.

  On the other hand… more people are using Skype than are blogging. As cultural, economic, political and technological phenomena go, don’t you think there may be something to write about? We do, we are, and we’re digging deep into what it means.

  Your faithful reader.

  Phil Wolff

• Paul Birch on Blog this Chat

  Great idea ! Could be enhanced by including a process by which all participants to the chat give their explicit and authenticated permission for the chat to be posted.

• Scott Young on Blog this Chat

  UserLand (www.userland.com) is interested in working on this with you for both our Manila (primarily internal blogs for corporate and academic environments) and Radio UserLand (personal blog tool). We use Skype on a daily basis internally as do many of our customers and can see how this could save lots of time. Ditto for posting audio or video recordings to a blog as pod/vid casts. We already support most all of the popular APIs so it should be fairly straightforward. If you are interested, please let me know and I will hook you up with our lead developer.

• continued in the Skype Journal Comment River: 200 fresh comments

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