March 13, 2008... Announcement: "Chat Publisher™" now available.

Sparked by "Skype Public Chats" and the enormously clever innovation of "persistent" messaging... "Chat Publisher" can help transform working and social communities with more effective, efficient, and interesting conversation.

What follows is a description of "Chat Publisher™" and the reasons for its creation.

The concept behind publishing a Skype public chat is to create a frictionless way for interested persons to make their views known and communicate with both the blog owner and the world at large. The typical process of commenting on web forums today is cumbersome, time-consuming, and prone to error... but joining a public Skype chat is accomplished with just one single click.

Because "Chat Publisher™" draws people into using Skype, it makes available to the blogger's community Skype's rich communication environment that includes group messaging, voice calling, video calling, conferencing, and exchange of data files of all types. This far surpasses the capability of a simple text comment.

In the expected configuration, a person reading a blog article sees the ongoing commentary next to it (an in-frame display window). The same window might also appear on the page containing the permanent article. This accomplishes several things:

1. It informs the reader of varying perspectives on the subject at hand,
2. It helps the reader decide whether he wants to participate
3. It gives the reader some perspective, before actually joining the chat, that enables him to later make an informed comment as opposed to a stupid one.
4. It gives a reader having a strong interest in the subject matter a way to be informed about ongoing discussion and about new blog postings as they occur. He can then control his style of notification with his own Skype preferences ("Notify me", "Don't notify me", or "Notify me when these words are mentioned:"

Privacy and anonymity is handled somewhat differently than it would be on the web. Here the participant controls how he displays his identity (name/avatar/mood/presence) and who can contact him (chats and calls) by adjusting his own Skype preferences. To protect the blog's community from spammers, the web page where the ongoing conversation is stored is not indexed by Borderless, and it instructs robots and web crawlers with a "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW" command. "Chat Publisher™" is available to anybody that "owns" a public Skype chat. It is not for private chats or for "multi-chats" because of their inherent expectation of privacy. At the present time, no other protective steps are being taken to enhance the security of published Skype chats that are, after all, "public" by definition.

In its first iteration and while inevitable bugs are being squashed, Borderless intends to update the published threads of conversation every 15 minutes. Once it appears that "Chat Publisher™" is serving a worthwhile purpose for all concerned, it will be moved to a dedicated machine and updates will happen more often, perhaps every 60 seconds. This move will likely come about within 30 days.

"Chat Publisher™" is a free service. There is no intention of charging a fee for it. It will be supported by placement of ads in a column next to the comments. Borderless will choose "adwords", hopefully with the blog owner's assistance, that reflect both the blog's subject matter and the expected content of the chat conversation.

Signing up for "Chat Publisher™" service requires just a few pieces of information:

• Page Title:
• Heading:
• Heading URL (for your homepage):
• Sub-heading:
• 2nd sub-heading:
• HTML for joining your public chat (get from Skype):
• Words to characterize the content of the expected chat conversation:

Contact garnet_stone via Skype for further details or to sign up for "Chat Publisher™".