Monday, April 16, 2007

** YackPack **

YackPack appears to be growing and spreading around the world and is an alternative to using Skype for audio communication. There are a few things to be careful with - in YackPack you can see how many others are online in the bottom right of the widget - but you don't know who they are ( specially ifthey do not talk, but just lurk - it may be perfectly innocent eg no mic ). You have also to be careful when talking and you must take turns when speaking as your microphone does not cut off your firends from talking - you could talk over each other. ( my friend Allanah was talking to Jane Nicholls recently - apparently they had to use a rather old fashioned method of turn taking by using 'over and out' to let each other know that they had finished speaking!!!!).









2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for writing about us!

One thing to watch out for: if you have two (or more) widgets on the same page, you can end up hearing yourself talk. If your speakers are loud (or your microphone sensitive), this can induce a feedback. One way to prevent this is to use different channels for each widget. Another one is to have the extra widgets set to "opt-in" mode, by adding "optin=true" to the "flashvars" part of the embed code (it's in there twice, and you'll need to add it to both places). Probably easiest just to use a separate channel for each widget :)

cheers,
Michael Fortson
CTO, YackPack

Mr Harrington said...

Many thanks for the advice Michael and thank you for leaving a comment on my blog. Your new tool is being tried out here in Europe by my EU firends on our blog. I have also had a few great instant conversations across the globe with great ease - fab new tool thanks.

A dear friend

It seems very apt to be writing this blog post in tribute to a dear, dear friend. The world has lost a true global educational  IT innovator...