Communication has always been of great interest to me, and I'm always looking for news ways to communicate better with more people.
I've found a tool called "Ventrillo":http://www.ventrilo.com/ that is very interesting. It allows multiple people to speak to one another all at the same time while allowing each user to customize his experience and availability while maintaining a very high level of audio quality. If you're into real-time audio communication, I highly recommend taking a look at it. Let me know if you do and I'll be happy to play around with it with you.
I'm also just starting to play with "Odeo":http://odeo.com/ as well as other forms of podcast and vlog aggregation. While real-time communcation certainly has it's place in the world, there's something to be said for being able to consume information on our own time.
Generally speaking, real-time communications tend to be focused at smaller, more personal audiences while information that waits for us to be ready for it is generally aimed at larger more public audiences. Of course there are some exceptions. Email and the hand-written letter are both my-time communications intended for small personal audiences.
I'm interested in exploring other personal my-time methods of communcation. For instance, we often leave voice-mail for one another. However, more often than not, we do so only because the person was unable to speak to us real-time and our message indicates little more than a request to contact us when available. What use does my-time voice communication have in the world?
To find out, I'm using a little known Odeo feature that allows you to "leave me a voice message":http://odeo.com/sendmeamessage/jimreverend that I can then listen to at my leisure. It's like voice-mail but without the point of asking me to call you back. So, if you have a microphone, please consider "leaving me a message":http://odeo.com/sendmeamessage/jimreverend. It can be short, long, clean, dirty, important, or trival. If you have something to tell me that you'd normally email about, consider "leaving me a message":http://odeo.com/sendmeamessage/jimreverend instead. Or, if you have nothing at all to say, feel free to say nothing "in a message to me":http://odeo.com/sendmeamessage/jimreverend.
Let's see how useful (or not useful) this can be.
