Danah Boyd asks a few questions that Stuart Henshall answers with verve. My own answers to Danah... 

Danah: I’d really like to understand the excitement of social software enthusiasts. What is it about Skype that motivates you?

1. Skype engages people who believe their ears more than their eyes. Give Skype to someone in the music business. Or to a dyslexic or someone with ADD. Or to someone who listens to sports or talk radio. This is their linear, visually simple medium. Things should fit people.
2. My Skype addressbook is local. It's unmediated by a third party (unlike my AOL buddy list) and lives on the edge of the cloud, not on a server. This means my addressbook is private. It also means that software/network extensions to my addressbook can scale well and be diverse. My contacts are mine.
3. I can call anonymously. Just log out as me, log in as Mary Had A Little Lamb, and call someone. Then log out and never use that ID again. Unless they recognize my voice, I'm safe. Anonymity (or at least pseudonymity) is vital in larger communities. This assures that 911 calls are made. That whistleblowers reveal secrets. That journalists get tips. Anonymity enables individuality and civility. 
4. Skype recognizes the social importance of privacy. Not only is my data kept locally, I control my profile, I control who can see when I'm available, and my conversations are encrypted from my headset to yours. IM, especially at work, is often monitored; phone calls less so. Skype creates a more trusted room in which to talk. Privacy leads to stronger community.
5. Skype moments are exposed by the software. Those user moments are your impulses to use yellow pages, white pages, caller-ID, call waiting, and file sharing. Those moments can be perceived and aided by programmers. So you will shortly be able to leverage your existing online social networks to find a relevant stranger to call, to populate your address book, to see a thorough profile of the stranger calling you (including whom you know in common), to have a side chat explaining the purpose of the call, perhaps to charge the caller for your time, or to securely share that song you're teaching them to sing over the phone. Skype informs phone calls with everything we've learned about software and the web.
6. Skype makes calls more like SMS and IM and less like One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingy. Multimodal, contextual, and soon with time shifting.   

In short, Skype promises to bring everything I love about my TiVo to my phone.  

Danah: Do you think that its popularity will be limited to specific communities?

No, but some communities will come first.

• Early adopters will be computer users. Millions of us.
• As people buy smarter phones and POTS-to-Skypenet gateways arise, everyone who has a mobile will use Skype-powered services.

If Skype was just the conversation triggered by your connection in your online community, that would be nice.

But it's more.

Skype's address book and phone logs can inform community. How about if people I Skype show up higher in my friends list, or get promoted from my fans list? What if recent frequent callers in my work-related address book show up in my intranet blog's Skyperoll?

I'll always take tacit data from user behavior over expressed content when understanding social networks. For the first time, my telephony behavior becomes useful as a sociocultural informant.

Danah: My skepticism increased dramatically when i read that Skype thinks it’s better than IM clients "Because it works!" What on earth does that mean?

It works as promised. Ummm, that's novel. Exceptional, even. Especially considering that it works over dialup, with encryption, on pretty average machines. Lots of geek cred under the hood to instantly replace hundreds of billions of dollars in telephony infrastructure with a 3 minute download, a headset, and an Internet connection.

From an industrial engineering and user experience view, they slashed the distance from thinking about calling someone to talking with that person. Skype cuts the number of tasks, clicks, typing, memorization and thinking that lead to the call. If both parties have Skype, you can even Skype me in one click.

Skype also helps with discovery. Can you imagine looking for books if Amazon only took ISBN codes? Skype's lookup works well when the other party is online. And this will only get better.

About IM, when you're talking to someone, Skype lets you IM them using its own chat client. A personal backchannel, great for passing urls back and forth.   

Assuming you're running Windows, please try it. Get the feel for it. Skype me or look up someone in a far away city and just ring a stranger to say "hello, how's the weather?".

Dave Winer says that all bloggers are inherently journalists. I concur but that begs the question, how much of a journalist are you? This may affect your ability to get a press pass, to invoke press shield rules, or get into one of those fancy reporter bars. Mostly, it affects how much readers and sources can trust you. One of the Berkman lawyers said state laws define a journalist many ways, each modified by local case law. Two of the factors many of the laws consider is how much you behave like a journalist and whether you identify yourself as a journalist.

So that leads me down a path shown by Lessig's Creative Commons licenses: you should be able to pick and choose among the characteristics of a journalist or publisher.

What's on the menu?

From my blog's 1999 Editorial Policy.

1. Accuracy. Anything that purports to be non-fiction should be true. Which means it should be accurate in fact and in context.

2. Labeling and Sourcing. If we are not certain that something is accurate, we should either not publish it, or should make that uncertainty plain by clearly stating the source of this information and its possible limits and pitfalls. To take another example of making the quality of information clear, we believe that that if unnamed sources must be used, they would be labeled in a way that sheds light on the limits and biases of the information they offer.

3. Explicit Conflicts of Interest. The content of anything that sells itself as journalism should be free of any motive other than informing its consumers. In other words, it should not be motivated, for example, by the desire to curry favor with an advertiser or to advance particular political interest. On the other hand, much of the content of this site has at least one point of view. We reserve the right to let our contributors opine, so long as author biases or conflicts are explicit and on record.

4. Accountability. The contributors to this site hold ourselves as accountable as any of the subjects we write about. We are eager to receive complaints about our work, will investigate complaints diligently, and correct mistakes of fact, context, and fairness prominently and clearly.

5. Caveat Lector. Information contained here is from sources believed to be reliable. This information is not necessarily complete

And I should have a Corrections Policy.

1. We always publish corrections at least as prominently as the original mistake was published.

2. We are eager to make corrections quickly and candidly.

3. Although we welcome letters to the editor or discussion group posts that are critical of our work, an aggrieved party need not have a letter to the editor published for us to correct a mistake. We will publish corrections on our own and in our own voice as soon as we are told about a mistake by anyone -- our contributors, an uninvolved reader, or an aggrieved reader -- and can confirm the correct information.

4. Our corrections policy should not be mistake for a policy of accommodating readers who are simply unhappy about a story that has been published.

5. Information about corrections or complaints should be directed to Phil Wolff at my email address or through comments on the weblog.

As a publisher I have a Privacy Policy.

1. We don't collect any information that you don't volunteer.
2. We will be clear about what information we expose.
3. Cookies may be used to create a better user experience on this site if you opt in.
4. We will not distribute your contact information (or other personal data) to third parties without your consent unless compelled by our hosts at Userland, compelled by law, or as needed for the operation and conduct of this site (service, repair, fact checking, etc.).
5. WebTrends. "dijest.com uses WebTrends Live to analyze traffic to this web site. WebTrends Live does not create individual profiles for visitors. Unlike some tracking services WebTrends Live does not have a database of individual profiles for each visitor. WebTrends Live only collects aggregate data. "

I also have a Syndication Policy (a handy place to stick your Creative Commons license):

My home page is available in several formats for syndication. If you're interested, thanks! [list the RSS and other urls and describe them]

Terms of Use

You don't need my permission to use this material provided you:

1. Do not charge for my content (You are charging? Call or write me first.)

2. Do not change what I say.

3. Link back to my home page: http://dijest.com/aka. The latest version of this is included in the Channel Link element.

4. Include "Copyright 1996-2003 Philip Wolff. All rights reserved." with the feed. This should be in the Channel Description element anyway.

Questions? Problems. Call me.

Does that make me a complete journalist? I don't think so. 

Maybe if I subscribe to the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists? They say that journalists should:

• Seek truth and report it. Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
• Minimize harm. Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.
• Act independently. Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know.
• Be accountable. Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.

That code lists 37 behaviors that constitute professional conduct. Looking at them, you can tell that each one has shades of gray.

Now I'm not the first to think about this, certainly not the best. Dave Winer got me started thinking about this. Microcontent News' John Hiller also thought about this along the way. His April 2002 essay Are Bloggers Journalists? On the rise of Amateur Journalism and the need for a Blogging Code of Ethics and his brief Blogging Code of Ethics ("Amateur Journalists are inherently biased. Caveats are critical online. Blogging doesn't magically make you immune from Libel and Slander.") are great starting points.

So I need a policy generator.

Something like an online quiz that runs through each behavior and prompts me to pick some variation, then spits out the appropriate boilerplate. Anyone care to help me?

Companies needs these for their intranet and public blogs too. I want them from government operated weblogs too. Policies and blog-specific codes of ethics help readers understand how, when, and how much to trust a given weblog. As blogs become more important to our understanding the news and our institutions, we need that added context.