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You can check out Chatterbox at http://www.talkingcommunities-online.com/
To talk, you just press and hold the left control key. If you are the speaker, a microphone icon appears next to your name in the list of participants. If someone else is talking, a queue marker appears next to your name indicating your number order. Your holding down that key does not interfere with your hearing or with anyone else. Or you can hit the left control key and S, that will lock the control key so you can talk through the microphone and your hands are free to type. You can also hit control M to mute your microphone so you don't accidentally turn it on.
It appearears that the main factor affecting voice quality is the microphone. Headset microphones work best because they keep the distance between your mouth and the microphone constant.
According to Peter, this platform works well for 98% of today's firewalls.
The audio quality was excellent. We heard a seamliess stream of sound with little or no effect from Internet delays. For me, the worst was one participant in Texas who has a dialup connection. Sometimes his voice broke up, and sometimes he timed out before his message got through. But that stood out as an anomaly. Everyone else, regardless of where they were and how they were connected, came through very well. We had someone in Costa Rica, a couple people in Canada, people on the East Coast and the West Coast; and they were connected by a wide variety of means. Because of the high quality, there was very little chatter about technical matters. We just talked about subject matter. The mechanism we were using was transparent. This was in contrast to our experience with other voice discussion platforms, like PalTalk, where much of our conversation centered around the voice problems of various participants.
In addition to voice, there is also a text chat area, and moderators can "push" Web pages, making them appear in a window to the right. Participants can click on the links that appear in that window to check out additional pages.
Moderators can mute individuals or everyone except other moderators, and can clear the queue of people waiting to talk next, to maintain control over the discussion.
Currently people who are muted for voice are automatically muted for text chat as well. That's something that the developers could and should change. Text and voice should be handled separately, so participants have a channel of communication to sort out technical difficulties and differences of viewpoint when they have been denied the abilit to use voice.
For conversations in a large room, the audio is half-duplex, where only one person can talk at a time. For one-to-one conversations, it can be full-duplex, two people able to speak at the same time.
If the discussion gets very active and busy, Peter suggests introducing the protocol of typing an exclamation mark (!) in the text chat area to indicate that you want to speak, as the equivalent of raising your hand; then waiting for the moderator to call on you.
Darrell Voth, one of the participants, works for a company that offers Chatterbox services on a hosted basis at very low cost. Check www.orbitalk.com/globalvoice
But the software is very reasonably priced for montly rental on a hosted basis, for lease to buy, and for purchase. The server runs on any Windows platform. And you can spread your licensed capability across multiple servers. For instance, if you have bandwidth to spare, you might want to buy Chatterbox for less than $5000 for 100-simultaneous-user capacity and set up your own service, renting voice conferencing business. This seems like a natural add-on business for ISPs and Web hosting companies.
One of our participants, Cathy Anne Murtha, noted that she runs Chatterbox from her PC at home over a cable modem line. The available bandwidth on that kind of connection is plenty good enough to handle 25 simultaneous users. Peter added that some cable-modem ISPs offer a choice of speeds with a scale of prices. For instance, reportedly, Roadrunner offers a 2-mbit upload that would handle 100 or more Chatterbox users. But to have your PC act as a server for this software, you need a static IP address. Another chat participant noted that some ISPs will provide a static IP address for a small increase in service fees (e.g., $15/month). Some ISPs provide dynamic addresses only and discourage any serving of content from home-based PCs. But you could still host this conferencing platform in that kind of environment with a service called DNS2GO which places an application on your computer that gives you a static IP address. Reportedly, this service is free for personal use, but there is a fee for business use. For info on their pricing, check http://dns2go.deerfield.comcom/pricing
You can hear the full discussion of this at my Web site at http://www.samizdat.com/audio/chatterbox.rm
or read it at http://www.samizdat.com/chat204.html
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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