Did you know you can have a chat room of your own on your site or blog for free? Most of us have had an IM (instant message) talk with a friend real time and if you have been to a chat room talking with many people at once then you might like a chat room of your own.
Though chat room talks are in real time like in IM that is where the similarity ends. With a chat room you can hold group chats with co-workers, group members, interviews with authors, webinars, discuss your genre or techniques, have authors chat with their readers. With some chat room applications you can hold large discussions with up to one hundred people, which might be a little crazy, but you get the idea.
Some of the chat rooms, also called chat rolls and chat boxes, are free and along with a blog posting board were you can add content for an event, such as a writing chat where a number of authors write a story together, you can have an hour or two or more of fun.
How can you do this you ask?
If you have a website that has more than one page you can add a private chat room to one of the pages and do not list that page on the navigation bar.
For the blog you would make another, separate blog to use as the chat room that you set for privacy!
For instance, on Blogger (Blogspot) under SETTINGS go to BASIC and then to ADD YOUR BLOG TO OUR LISTING and choice NO. Then at LET SEARCH ENGINES FIND YOUR BLOG select NO again and finally click SAVE SETTINGS!
If Blogger isn't your blog provider you will need to take a look at your blog providers privacy settings to see if it could be done there.
Some of the free chat room sites that I looked at are; xat, chat roll, chat-form, spin chat and parachat. To find out what else is out there you can Google and Bing search to see what other chat rooms services there are available.
Of course, like most site on the internet where you have to join the community, chat room or chat roll sites are no different. You sign up for an account at one of these sites and you place the HTML code they provide on your blog or site. If you don't know how to place HTML codes you will need to learn how or have someone do it for you. Then the only way someone can get to your chat room is if they have the url (Uniform Resource Locator) which you provide.
Also with some of the chat communities your guest will have to sign up at their site to participate in you chat room as well. You can even have more security by setting the blog settings so that your guest or members must sign in to your blog too.
To see what chat rooms are all about, one place you can visit is the writers and artists site Minds-Eye. http://minds-eye.ning.com/
That's Using A Private Chatroom: In A Nut Shell.
Happy Chatting!
2009 JD HolidayJD'S Writers Blog
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