Chris Betcher

It’s cool to see just how our networks of connectivity are letting us find each other so easily and spontaneously, and the conversations that are evolving out of those connections.

While checking my mail tonight, my Twitter goes off. It seems that Jeff Utecht in China is hosting a chat session using something called Wiziq. A number of Twitterers are talking about it. I’m intruiged, but I didn’t have Jeff on my Twitter list so I carry on with what I was doing. More conversation tweets out about this session, and I’m following along vicariously through everyone else’s Twitters. Pretty soon I see another tweet from Kim Cofino (from Bangkok, Thailand) talking about how she’s chatting with Graham Wegner (from Adelaide, Australia) and Chrissy Hellier (from Napier, New Zealand). By this stage, I feel like the party is going on without me, so I decide to have a guess at Kim’s Skype name and do some gatecrashing. 😉

Next thing I’m in a text chat with Graham, Kim, Chrissy and Susan Sedro (Singapore). I suggest we try going to voicecall, and there is some concern over how well that will work. I suggest that we won’t know till we try it… “use it till it breaks”, I suggest.

So we move to voice on Skype, and it’s all good. Poor Graham got shafted as his computer didn’t have a microphone, so he follows along on text chat for a while. Hmm, we start to wonder how many people we can get in here before we break it? Only one way to find out…

I spot Allanah King (Nelson, New Zealand) online and drag her in to the chat (When I say I dragged her in, I don’t mean that she was unwilling at all… on a Mac you literally drag someone’s icon into the chat window to add them to the call) So now we have five.

It’s early morning in east coast USA by this time, and my friend Janet Barnstable (Oak Park, Illinois) pops up on Skype… drag her in too. Carolyn Foote (Austin, Texas) comes online, so in to the chat she goes. Sharon Peters (Montreal, Quebec) appears, and so we drag her in too. This is fun!

We still haven’t broken it, and apart from a bit of background noise and a couple of scratchy bits, Skype is holding up remarkably well. We need more!

Lisa Durff (Maryland) and Robin Ellis (Pennsylvania) appeared online and also got dragged in, although not at the same time, so the most we had online at any given moment was nine.

This was tons of fun… just being able to spontaneously pull a chat together like this is very cool. We had 10 people, from 6 countries and 5 timezones, all chatting away together. As the only male in the group I feel like we maybe need to balance the numbers up a little next time… I tried to drag Jason Hando (Sydney, Australia) in the call, but he must have been away from his computer at the time.

Thanks everyone for jumping in to the call and sharing like that. It was nice to connect some voices with some of the names I recognised. We must do it again some time.