Today we enjoyed our second big NIPCC Skype conference call. Participating were nine of us, including five members near Nagoya (Ernie, Esther, Mineko, Robert, and Chris) and four members at large (cyber-criminalist Yuji in Takashima, club founder Martin in Canada, Alex in the UK, and Stephen in California). Skype made it very convenient to talk with ex-members as well as current members on vacation or traveling all over the world. It was a little awkward to get together all at the same time (Alex had to log on at four in the morning) but I found it a great convenient, even for us living in Nagoya, eliminating our commute.

Technically, Skype's voice chat worked quite well. In our two hour conversation, only a couple times did people drop out, and I was able to add them back in, once I realized they were out. The half-second latency, though, stilted our conversation. We all (well, mostly all) hesitated to speak up for fear of speaking over someone. As a result, just two or three bold men did 95% of the talking. But as a consolation, the text chat was often very active, with a stream of questions, URLs, and sometimes completely separate threads of conversation, all running in parallel to the spoken chit chat. I found the combination stimulating.

Our main technical topic was blogging. Robert encouraged us to visit our NIPCC unifeed which collects all our blogs, photos, and twits. (The same information is abridged text-only on twitter.) Chris noted that only four of us were collected, and asked why some members still don't have blogs. Unemployed Stephen reported he can't find the time! Robert suggested microblogging (such as twitter.com) and del.icio.us as quick and easy, but admits he himself spends hours a day blogging. More than time, a deeper problem is that most members still consider blogs limited to diaries, stream of consciousness, noise about cats. Ernie further maintained that blogs are just one tool, appropriate for some things but not others; good blogs should focus on things (like travel in Japan) and not people; and Twitter is the ultimate narcissistic and uninteresting.

Besides the tech talk, we also enjoyed some catching up with all those who'd moved away, talking about the local weather and work. Martin Green explained how he lives in nature, and maintains a North Canadian public school network. A fantastic idyllic life to those of us still stuck in Nagoya!

All in all, I enjoyed meeting through Skype, and hope that all future NIPCC meetings use something like Skype, at least as an adjunct to physical meetings, so that we can all conveniently participate, wherever we are. (We still have to figure out how to present slides and demo screens.) It's the meeting of the future - today!