Tips on using Skype as a community media production tool
Charlie Rose has a knack for drawing people out, getting them to share their ideas and views in a way that illuminates. But did you ever stop to think that the only people who appear on his show are celebrities? And that 99 percent of the interesting people in this world are not celebrities?
So who's going to interview all those people? Answer: the people will interview the people. What tool will they use to do this? Skype. How will these interviews be shared? Over the Internet, via public access television stations, via podcasting and via various computer media.
Skype was created as a no-cost long-distance phone service. It does that very well. What it also allows you to do, if you're just a little technically-minded and have a homebrew gene or two, is to record your Skype phone conversation, with the other person's permission, to an audio file on a second computer. Once you've recorded the audio, you can edit out the uhms, ahs and pauses, compress the audio and then place it on the web for public consumption.
