I’ve been thinking lately that blogging, podcasting and video blogging (vlogging?) show how individuals are able to create content so easily that the wave of independent content producers are sometimes more powerful than the large organizations they are competing with. This is not a new thought, but what I saw today certainly made me think it again.

Jyve is a Skype based app that lets individuals register themselves as experts in certain fields (French teacher, AJAX development, iPods, whatever) and then people can contact them (searching through Jyve’s directory of all the registered experts by topic) and start a Skype call (chat and email are also available) with them. The customer (who has created an account, including payment info) and expert negotiate a per minute (or flat fee) rate, and then the call starts up including a metering interface somewhat like a taxi-cab… tracking the total cost of the ’lesson’. You can also charge for documents, sent through Skype’s file sharing features, so if you had a great set of Visual Studio templates, or a PDF of information related to… well, whatever it is you are an expert on… then you could sell it to your customer for a flat fee. Picture it… giving expert consulting right from your home… even if that home is in Mexico and all your customers are in Europe.