I know that I'm late to the party on this one, but I've begun using Skype. Ken, a friend of mine from way back, has been bugging me for awhile to try it. I just didn't see the advantages over Y!M voice. I've been a fan of VoIP since the early '90's when there was no reason to be a fan. I guess I read too many of Jeff Pulver's newsletters, and now even his blog.

I started reading about the encryption and security features of Skype, and the amazing clarity. Then some folk started blogging about using Skype to record podcasts. Ok, this sold me. Ken and I tested it. Clarise and I have done some testing too. The clarity truly is amazing.

The trick to using your computer as a phone though, is the microphone. I use a laptop, and the built-in mic has the gain of whisper. But, aha, I have two Bluetooth headsets, my trusty Jabra BT200, and the Plantronics M3000 I was given to test.

Pairing the headset to the Belkin Bluetooth dongle hanging out of the USB port on the back of my laptop was a breeze, repairing it with my phone is a breeze. Having to do so is a bit of a pain.

Recording both sides of the conversation with Audacity, is another matter. Many have written about the various work-arounds to accomplish this. Audacity seems to pick up my side of the conversation just fine. Now, with everyone on the conversation using Audacity, and each recording their own voice, you actually have a very neat solution. You can import all the sound files into one Audacity project, get the time synchronization right, and you have a separate track for each "voice" in the podcast. This makes it much easier to edit, diminish background noise, and add "ambience". All the nonsense of two computers, or wiring up line-in and line-out with appropriate software to fool your sound card, seems silly. I LIKE having multiple tracks to play with. Much, much better.

Todd, let's do that podcast we were talking about.

I recently posted about Categories for news feeds and blogging, in relation to suggesting additional categories for Bayosphere Citizen Journalists' articles and for organizing the RSS, RDF or Atom feeds to which one might subscribe in a feed reader. You can read the original post in either the TeleInterActive Lifestyle or Bayosphere. Steven Livingstone-Perez responded, via trackback, in taghop: Managing Categories

Joseph A. di Paolantonio recently blogged how he re-organized his categories to use technorati tags and is hoping to move toward a better fine-tuned folksonomy.

While i belive this is useful, I still see a few factors that I hope taghop.ORG can address when looking to perform such an activity.

-- StevenR2 in taghop: Managing Categories

So, I've spent some time since I saw Steven's response reading about Taghop, both in the COM and ORG domains. I created a Taghop account and added some URLs, for blogs from the TeleInterActive Press and Bayosphere, and used some of the "public" URLs for various news organizations. Taghop allows one to relate the tags/categories to others' tags or categories, and allows one to do so regardless of where one uses those tags, such as de.licio.us. So, Taghop was the impetus that I needed to create a del.icio.us account.

I'm still getting the feel for things at Taghop, and Taghop is in beta. Perhaps Steven can answer some questions for me, and please don't read anything below as a criticism.

• I found a "developer's page" - Is Taghop Open Source?
• What license is being used?
• Scaling: the presentation of how blogs are related seems a bit cumbersome, but the "example" showing graphical relationships is cool - perhaps a "map" of relationships might be better than a list. Or I may not understand how the relationship presentation works
• Is there anyway to add a tag/category to multiple URL's at once? It took me quite a bit of time to add the few URL's and tags that I've done so far.
• I see that there is a toolbar for IE, when is one coming for Firefox, Mosilla, Opera, Safari, etc? I don't use IE, except to test new CSS; so I'm not sure if the toolbar answers my above question.
• Is the best use of Taghop to have accounts at del.icio.us, flikr, Bayosphere, your own blogs, and the like, and to use Taghop to relate among one's own various accounts, web use and online social networks? That is, I get the feeling that one shouldn't try to import all of their bookmarks or blogmarks to Taghop, but only general or personalized pages at other online services that use a tagging system.
• How could Taghop help me achieve my goals of creating some "starting point" categories for our upcoming syndication aggregator/feed reader/blogging service and some more general categories for Bayosphere Citizen Journalists?
• What are the different purposes of taghop.COM and taghop.ORG? How should we use each to best help taghop?

Steven, Taghop looks like an interesting project/product/service. Perhaps you could help us understand Taghop better, and answer my questions, via a post on your blog, with a tracback here. I look forward to conversing with you.

The emergence of podcasting shown by Brian Livingston in "RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices" is striking. Brian uses statistics from FeedBurner.com and discovers that iTunes has already jumped to 9.53% of the aggregator market, putting it in the top 5 of feed wiki(List_of_news_aggregators,readers) used. I find this amazing because iTunes is really only usefull to subscribe to RSS feeds for podcasts, not for text based news or blogs as other aggregators. Also, other podscast only feed readers like iPodder [7.17%] and iPodderX [1.77%] are in the top 20. Podcasting has been growing much faster than blogging. RSS and RDF syndication has been around since the mid to late 1990's, and the first web logs started around the same time, but they didn't take off until the most recent U.S.A presidential election. Podcasting has been around for only a couple of years, and it has fewer providers [40,000 to 50,000 current estimates] then the estimated 10 million bloggers, but I would guess from the statistics presented by Brian that nearly as many people subscribe to podcasts as subscribe to syndicated feeds for news and blogs.

BTW, I realize that I've used various terms for the same thing, feed readers, RSS Aggregators, etc, all describe online services or plug-ins for web browsers or email clients and stand alone clients that read OPML allowing you to follow news, blogs, podcasts and other frequently updated web content using XML based technologies: RSSv1, RSSv2 and Atom.

Found via: Dan Gillmor in RSS Aggregators: Some Statistics

You can also find more information and other articles on aggregators on this blog by following this link. BTW, many of the aggregators listed are open source projects. I was disappointed to see that our favourite, RSSowl didn't make the the top 20 list.