Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Office generations. Carr says Microsoft Office is shifting toward collaboration and web publishing and to living more on the web than the desktop. His four generation model is a useful frame for thinking about the trends shaping office suites and the forces behind those trends.When I think of the future of the office, I keep seeing VoIM as integral, tightly coupled to workflow and best team practices. Just look at how web host Brinkster is now taking customer service calls on Skype.

If the Brinkster team was using an Asterisk based call center, they might be buying ChanSkype to bridge Asterisk to a server-hosted Skype client. FAQ. Shipping soon.

Pamela 2.5 out of beta. Pamela 3.0 beta launches for Skype 2.6 users. "Pamela 3.0 supports Skype 2.6 natively. This means that no additional drivers are required to record Skype calls. The result is a perfect recording without echo and latency." You might want to be choosy about which calls you post to a public server.

Speaking of Skype add-ons...

Still Not the Time to Move Beyond Skype WiFi Phone. Howard Chang replies to Jim Courtney who responded to Howard who disagreed with Jim's follow-up to Jim's first post. Back to you Jim.

The ones that dance about being monstrous while you chat on Skype. Verballs are still silly. It's their hair and expressions and proportions and colors and... everything. Just try to say Verballs without giggling. Speaking of names...

Naming convention in the IP telephony sector. A linguistic analysis of iotum, Skype and others by a branding expert.

Jeff Jarvis  

Skype to the Virtual MacFair 2006. Hey, we can't all live in Southern California. But you can hear many of the conferences sessions live over Skype.

How about a rock concert via Skypecast? Those guitarists were brought to you by Heineken.

Guitar.com's Rype. Not shipping yet but very cool.

"The new guitar.com will be a place for guitarists to interact musically and socially. We've developed Rype, a desktop application that allows musicians to record, edit and produce music. Rype has a social network built around it to allow musicians to collaborate, send each other music files, projects for collaboration, video chat, voice chat and instant message via Skype. Form virtual bands on guitar.com, then launch Rype, produce your songs and post them for sale on iTunes."

Tom Newton writes a skeptical (not paranoid) overview of Skype's security fitness for Insecure Magazine's eighth issue (pdf file). Tom says Skype shouldn't be on your network since Skype's operation is neither transparent (it's mostly hidden) nor unbeatable (therefore untestable). The threats he and the other security analysts discuss are hypothetical. No actual, real world problems have surfaced, no threats making the rounds. Makes me wonder if other apps are subject to the same selection criteria. Or when the focus will shift from Tom's "Don't say you weren't warned" to "10 steps to safe Skype deployments that make your customers happy."

Here's someone who wants to make at least their shareholders happy. Comcast: We'll squash Skype flat. See the original IP Democracy report from VON. I'm sure Comcast can offer a link to a softphone, but can they get people to adopt? Will they offer loss leaders like free calls to PSTNs? Will they navigate interoperability with other VoIP and VoIM services? Can they adapt their softphone to augment television viewing? Can they make it sufficiently obvious, easy, fun, engaging, useful, compelling, that people will try it and keep using it and tell their friends all about it? Not the first time around.