Recently in Technology Category

I think I'm way out of the mainstream on this behavior because I'm (a) highly technical; (b) want the widest possible audience for my blog; and (c) want anyone who desires to be able to get the latest pictures of my son as easily as possible.

The mainstream is never going to do the above. But will they even ever adopt more than one social network in the long run? 

That is, in a few years, will you see most people on Facebook now also regularly checking and posting to something else, e.g. Twitter or Buzz?

I don't think so. Friendster died. Yahoo 360 died. Myspace is dying. I'm starting to really believe Twitter and Facebook and now Buzz are in a winner-take-all battle for mainstream social network attention.

Yes, they're all a little different, especially Twitter, which can have its special use cases. However, as time passes and the battle matures, I can only imagine that Facebook and Buzz will try to capture some of these use cases.

I don't think the solution is more personal aggregators. Those are for tech people.

Finally, I don't think the UI experience on any of them are particularly good. They succeed in spite of themselves.

The short answer is this issue has always stemmed from a firewall problem. As such, messing with firewall settings has always fixed it.

It took so long to fix (for us) because I didn't immediately think firewall problem because audio and one video stream worked fine. So I kept looking at Webcam settings and drivers, and things having to do with Skype itself. No help there.

You should have the firewalls on both sides open to Skype. Ideally, you should port forward specific ports for Skype to the relevant computers. Doing so will ensure zero relays and increase your chances of high-quality video working correctly, as I outlined in a previous post.

The quickest solution is to set the Skype computer as the DMZ in your router/firewall. I don't recommend this long term for security reasons, but it's good for testing.

Also, remember to also check any software firewalls, e.g. on your operating system (OSX, Windows, etc.). The problem can also lie there.

Finally, doing these somewhat complex settings on a remote computer like my parents' computer can be tedious. I currently use Crossloop for messing with their computer, which is free and is easy enough to download and use that they can do that part.

Nothing had changed in the recent past before these peaks. There were no internal site changes and no additional external links. 

These spikes did not happen at times where other Webmasters were reporting major Google index changes. (I wouldn't expect such anyway since they returned to normal after a few days.)

The sites get search traffic from a wide swath of keywords that cut across many categories. The traffic is spread pretty evenly across keywords and keyword categories.

When looking at the increase, including when it was happening, it was clear that rankings increased across the board.

From between two to four days (depending on the incident), the traffic jumped up and remained the same for a bit, and then dropped back down.

What is the explanation for this? Here's the latest Webmaster world thread.

The threads give a number of theories:

I'm not sure if Skype actually checks the drivers to make sure you have one of these webcams, but my parents actually did have one and so I bought one too.  I actually bought this one, which has auto face-tracking that I figure would be good fit when Eli gets a bit older.  However, once I set it all up, neither direction was what you would call high quality. Mine was certainly better than before, but that was mainly due to the lighting adjustments in the software that came with the webcam.

Anyway, after a lot of messing around, I did get it to work as much as I think possible.  Here's how: