Instant Message Widget

For those of you using a blog (or some other kind of frequently-visited website) in your teaching, you might find this instant message service called Meebo useful. If you sign up for a Meebo account, you can create a little window to place on your blog that students can click on to see if you're online and chat. I'm going to try adding a Meebo widget to this post, and if you see "mendhamt is online" you can talk to me.

The system isn't perfect--some have had difficulty contacting me on it, but I've had quite a few students use it so far with quick questions and been very pleased that they were able to do so (I tell them it is for quick, simple questions only).
At the Meebo page you can also log into multiple instant message accounts with various providers at once. So if I have some people I want to communicate with who use AOL Instant Messenger, and some who use Google Talk, and some Yahoo, I add those to my Meebo account and use all of them from one place and without downloading their software. (I used to use AIM a lot, but it developed a bad reputation for adware and spyware, as have many other instant message providers). There's a chatroom feature as well, but it didn't work in the Franklin Pierce-Keene computer lab the day I tried it.