Last night I had the pleasure of chatting with Ted Wallingford on Skype for a while. Ted's one of the early members and supporters of the work we've been doing on the Realtime VoIP Community. For those of you who aren't familiar with Ted, he's one of the bright lights in the VoIP community at large. You can read his writing on Weblog Inc's VoIPFan, where he's the primary blogger, and on Mac VoIP.  Ted has also written two very good books, Switching to VoIP and VoIP Hacks, both published by O'Reilly.

Ted's someone who knows the Asterisk environment far better than I. My conversation yesterday with David Mandelstam about open source solutions tickled my thought processes. I knew I needed to talk to Ted about doing an interview or podcast or something with him. We kicked that idea around last night, and I'll be figuring out a plan of attack to share some of his thoughts and insights here real soon. We talked about VoIP, Skype, SightSpeed, and the industry as a whole, and Ted's depth and breadth of knowledge is a very valuable resource to us all. I encourage you to check out his blogs and books.

Another thought Ted triggered for me, something I've been meaning to do, is to reach out and connect with someone who's been a well known presence online for a long time - Phoneboy. he and I live within 50 miles of one another, and while I read him all the time, we've never met or talked. That will soon change. Oddly, my overlap with Phone laps into VoIP, Firewalls, DNS and all sorts of interesting areas. He's a resource I really need to tap into and share more of with readers here. So stand by for something on that front too.

I'll share where I'd like this to lead. There's an interesting and eclectic group called the Gillmor Gang that consists of several very bright minds assembled by Steve Gillmor. They do regular group podcasts of discussions they share. They focus on things like identity management, Web 2.0, and general net trends. They don't focus on VoIP. I'd like to assemle another gang to somewhat regularly (monthly?) put together a podcast conversation about trends, hot topics and interesting changes solely in the VoIP sector. I can think of several people I'd love to have participate in this sort of conversation, and I'll share some examples -

Ted Wallingford
Andy Abramson
Alec Saunders
Jeff Pulver
Martin Geddes
Phoneboy

There are plenty of other bright lights to join in as well. I think my role would be logistics and helping figure out what topics we try to talk about. And maybe what I need to investigate is setting up an Asterisk VoIP PBX to host a conference bridge that everyone who can participate can call into. We could perhaps record the whole session, edit the MP3, and do it up as a nice podcast. It's a brainstorm I'm working on.

If you think this is a great idea, thinkg this is a horrible idea, or know of someone you'd like to see included in a gang effort like this, please drop me a note.


Technorati Tags: Ted Wallingford, Andy Abramson, Jeff Pulver, Alec Saunders, Martin Geddes, Phoneboy, VoIP, podcast