The phone issue has been a big issue with Internet radio for a number of years. When I got into net radio, I came from a mainstream radio background so I basically brought a lot of things to net radio that has revolutionized it. I like to toot my own horn on this a lot. For instance format, I came from a 10 minutes programing and a 3-5 minutes break. Other net hosts were just drowning on and doing nothing and a lot of the programs did not much. Once I started using psa's and funny ads and music breaks, these others started doing it.
Phones are another issue that has been a huge problem for a number of years. Back when I started using phones, I had Yahoo phone and basically broadcast the calls out of the speakers and then recorded them and routed them back into the pc. This practice was never used much with broadcasters due to the quality being so damn poor. This was then proceeded by Alternacast and Alternacast was a way ahead of it's time.
Alternacast was made at first by wonder horse, this was a javascript type program that allowed people to talk to each other over a pc connection. No dialing, no tied up services it was all self contained. Alternacast had tons of issues with being an echo on the end of the callers. You needed to mute the mic when a host would answer the questions and sometimes the guests answers would be clipped and sometimes not heard. So it made for sloppy calls and programming. Alternacast would eventually go the way of the dino's and would open the door for Net meeting and Skye.
All of the methods mentioned and all after for awhile have proved to do one thing and not produce guests. What I mean is if you determine you want to book a guest what are you going to do. Book a guest on the issue of, yeah you will need to go here and download this and call me here. Not going to happen, guests want to be called or if they call you. They want a number and do it and that is it. Well the point of Net meeting and skype. These programs allowed people to go out and do what alternacast was doing and allowed people to talk over the pc. However the sound issues also came into play and was such screwball.
Craig Coleman came along and introduced the world of net radio to speaker phone and mic technology. Coleman would talk into his mic and hold a second mic over the speaker phone of his phone. Coleman would then record the interviews and this seem to work well. However sometimes this technology would be an issues with either party not speaking loud enough or too loud. This technology has become tweaked over time but it would eventually become the cotolo way.
Yes, Frank Cotolo created the best way and it has to do with his background in radio and technology background of mainstream radio. Back when Cotolo worked with the legendary Wolf man Jack. You had to do everything back in those days from booking to hosting to tech ends. Cotolo was playing around with a simple device, radio shack has something called a telephone recording device. You plug one end into your mic on your mixer and the other end into a headset jack on a cordless phone. Talk into the base phone/corded phone. It records the conversation with either winamp,cool edit,Sound forge,etc. This method can be screwed with by plugging into your mic, if you do not have a mixer. Now you can book guests and record calls in the classic sense.
Finally, phone technology has changed over the years like broadcasting itself, however it all boils down to simple stuff.
