YackPack

 

A couple of days ago some of my twitter friends who are videobloggers started talking about Yak Pack.  The metaphor is a web walkie talkie.  It is a little widget that allows live chat on any web site.   The videobloggers were using it on their wiki.  When I arrived to check it out, I heard Michael Verdi talking to a few others about the video blogging documentary.  It was a little strange, reminded me of citizen band or "CB" radios we used to use as teens in the late 1970's.

I'm connecting it to the questions that came up on yesterday's Community Squared telephone conference to discuss tagging communities and got onto the topic of how online communities are changing given Web2.0.  I was reflecting about snippets of conversation that happen around tagged items in the NpTech tagging community -- although not all have been deeply reflective conversations.  I used the metaphor of a school of fish swimming together in a tag stream.  Etienne, or someone asked "Does swimming together in a tag stream make us a community?"

So, here's a tool that may (or may not) facilitate those conversations around "stuff" or tagged items.   And, there's been some emerging use in this way, of course, from the online learning/educator community.

Via Stephen Downes I discovered some reflections from Always Learning about how they used Yak Pack to record audio conversation and then easily published the conversation.

Comments

[Kim Cofino]

Thanks for the link Beth!

We've been loving YackPack here on the international school circuit because we are all so far apart - especially because the "unified communication" widget allows asynchronous "audio e-mail," which means that our partner classes in the US, Korea, New Zealand, etc can communicate with us (here in Malaysia) without any time zone concerns.

[Beth Kanter]

Kim,

I learned a lot from your post!And, am enjoying your blog too!