I met Marc Eisenstadt a few months back, on the Vandals Tour of Europe that Greg and I did. He is the author of My Dog ("No, it's not about dogs."), and is the Chief Scientist of the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University in the UK:

I'm KMi's Chief Scientist, interested in fostering quality learning experiences with or without technology. My current work interests include very large scale presence via messaging and gaming; intelligent agents as mediating tools for human interaction; internet mapping and visualization; ubiquitous bandwidth and the educational challenge summed up by the phrase "wired... now what?".

My first interaction with Marc was through a technology that KMI has developed, called Flashmeeting (www.flashmeeting.com). I was really impressed with the ease of use, ergonomics, and functionality built into the web meeting application. We used it to organize the Social Tools for the Enterprise Symposium (held in London in July), and it really worked well for the meetings we were having with 8-12 attendees. The integration of lightly moderated video conferencing with chat made these meetings amazingly productive. I even spent most of one meeting sniping in the chat tab!

Some of my suggestions regarding Flashmeeting as a tool for interviews were immediately implemented, and I finally cornered Marc for an interview today.

Note: This initial interview shows all the signs of a thumb-fingered, unprepared interviewer. Forgive me; I'll do better in the future. My mike recording level was a little too low and Marc's is a little too loud. But what I am really interested in is the Flashmeeting tool as an interview device; although Marc's quick intro to KMi and their various initiatives is worth the time investment to replay the dialog.

You will note that the tool support time stamping with each "head shift" -- when one of the attendees takes control of the meeting, the tool records the shift. Each has its own URL, as well, which can be accessed by ALT-clicking on the timestamps in the scrollable margin: for example the suggested starting point of the interesting part of the interview is http://flash.kmi.open.ac.uk:8080/flashmeeting/memo.php?room=rockbake&password=b80e7f-449&jumptime=00:04:45, which was generated in this way.

At the bottom of the app is a timeline view, which can be played like a music or video player, and the timeframe elements are themselves active.

In the interview Marc offers a unique insight into the fusion of proximity and other online social cues to create "The Next Best Thing" to face-to-face interaction, in projects like Hexagon and Buddyspace.

I'm glad to say that Marc has graciously agreed to guestblog at Get Real for the next few weeks, and I will be trying to queue up a number of other interviews using Flashmeeting, as well.