Wow… I’m amazed when somebody says they can’t get in touch with me. I have so many contact points now that it seems I’m always connected to somebody. I wonder why so many people are so stressed these days?

So, I retrieve my voicemail at work. The lady says, “I’ve been trying to catch you for about three weeks!” She then says, I guess I’ll try back another time. Here’s the kicker: She didn’t let me know her name. She didn’t leave her phone number. I don’t know why she was calling.

It seems to me that if someone needs to get in contact with you, they should make an effort to provide a way for you to contact them, too! I have the following methods of contact: office phone, home phone, home-office phone, cell phone, FD portable radio, fifty-gazillion email addresses, three internet messenger accounts and now SKYPE. If you are in my network of people — or even if you’re trying to make entry INTO my network — you can reach me. Some people even have ALL of the super-secret contact specifics. I laugh when one of them says, “I couldn’t reach you.”

Now, here’s some info on this thing called “Skype.” This is an internet telephony service that makes regular phone calls sound like 1930s radio broadcasts. The clarity is unbelieveable. If you ever listen to podcasts (I listen to many) that include interviews, you may wonder how these people sound so good — especially knowing that they are a continent apart. Many are using Skype to handle their calls. I’ve only made a few calls so far — and have been contacted by somebody that I didn’t know who found my “Skype Me” banner on my site. I must say, though, that this is the finest PC2PC calling that I’ve experienced thus far. If you’re truly eager, you can even subscribe to their “SkypeOut” service. It allows you to call from your PC to ANY telephone. Very cool. All you need is their free software and a USB phone or compatible headset.

If I’m online, you can pretty much guarantee I’ll have my Skype software running.

Give it a try, you can download the software for free: Skype
And, here’s a little bonus they talk about on their site:

Skype Chat (some people call it “Instant Messaging”, but doesn’t “chat” sound much nicer and cleaner?) is the hidden gem of Skype. True, Skype is first and foremost about calling. But there are many times when you’d want to use text chat instead of, or together with, voice calls. So we went to great lengths to make it useful for ourselves — there are probably thousands of Skype chats going on among the Skype staff and our friends and partners at any given time — which hopefully means its useful and fun to you too.