Last week, I wrote about TwitterGram, a tool/service developed by Dave Winer that lets you record a brief audio message and post it to Twitter.

It’s already proving to be quite a popular tool, judging from the flurry of ‘grams people have been posting. Being popular isn’t the same as being effective, incidentally. No matter for the moment: as this medium evolves, I’m pretty sure it will quickly find a place in organizational communication.

Until now, I’ve only used TwitterGram once primarily because the process you have to go through really is a bit fussy, involving as it does recording on your PC or portable device in the right file format and then uploading that file via the TwitterGram website.

Now, there’s a very easy way to do it, via a new dial-in service from BlogTalkRadio.

Here’s how it works:

1. Decide which phone you want to use to call in TwitterGrams. The phone must have Caller ID.
2. Visit the new phone signup page. Enter the phone number from step 1, and your Twitter username and password.
3. When you want to leave a TwitterGram using your phone, dial 646-716-6000 (a US number so +1 from outside). Leave a short message, less than half a minute (remember the 200K limit). Hang up when you’re finished.

I tried it and it worked perfectly, right up to the part where the TwitterGram should have appeared on Twitter. It didn’t.

The fault isn’t TwitterGram’s, as far as I can tell. It seems to be to do with caller ID. I used Skype to make my call. Skype does support caller ID for the UK SkypeOut number I used. But caller ID on Skype isn’t foolproof.

Easier just to pick up a normal phone and make the call, I hear you say! Well, yes, but I want to use Skype. Apart from anything else, it’s considerably cheaper.

I’m sure a niggle like this will be resolved sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I’m equally sure that being able to phone in your audio comments just made TwitterGram massively appealing.