Yesterday I had the opportunity to take a day trip down to Chapel Hill, NC for PodcasterCon 2006. Many or most of you who happen to look at this blog may ask why I would do that. One of the side projects I have been working on for some time now is to develop a podcaster for the community of practice in competitive intelligence. This has been a long-term side project full of challenges and fun. What I have so far can be seen and heard at cipodcast.com for anyone who is interested.
First, my thoughts on PodcasterCon. It was organized as sort of the un-convention, which was an excellent change from other trade shows and conventions I’ve been to in the past where the flow of information was very much a one-way thing. Speakers were very open to audience input and the atmospehere for the day was very collaborative in nature. It goes to show that podcasting is still such a new medium and that, while some may be more technically adept than others we’re all really still babes in the woods in all of this.
Speaking of being babes in the woods, I had a few “oh, crap” moments with respect to technical mistakes I’ve made with the two episodes of the podcasts I’ve done to date. I also had a few light bulbs go off over my head, and some good ideas will definitely be taken away from PodcasterCon. It wasn’t exactly what I expected, but that’s not a complaint.
The trip down to Chapel Hill was very smooth. I had found a cheap airfare from Dulles to Raleigh-Durham for under $100 on United. No doubt that same flight is now more epenvise since the demise of Independence Air. So I jumped on that fare several weeks ago and booked my rental car for the short drive to Chapel Hill. All travel went nice and smooth, and my first trip to Chapel Hill reveals what looks to be like a very nice little college town. I’ll go on record as saying that I love college towns, having gone to an urban school myself. Who wouldn’t love a place like C’ville or Madison?
Anywho, this podcast thing has been one technical challenge after another. I’ve begun to understand just how technically inclined I am not. The audio recording, as frustrating as that was, is actually not the hard part. There are a number of tools out there that simplify all of the back-end elements of a podcast. The downside to the tools which make life simple is that they reduce the individual ownership to one degree or another. One of the goals of my podcast, I’ll admit, is to present myself as somebody who you may want to seek out to help with your competitive intelligence. In order to do that the podcast has to, in part, drive you to the podcast web site to find out more about me or my company. There are some elements which you need to have in place to make that flow work, and the technical pieces of that are a bit beyond me in a sense.
It’s not so much that they’re beyond me as much as I really don’t have the requisite time or attention span to get up to speed on all of these things. One thing I realize is that I owe a big fat thanks to Yukino for hosting and having set up the Moveable Type installation which makes this and several other blogs possible. My head starts to hurt when I think about figuring out CGI databases and all that junk. Likewise I need to get back on that HTML horse I was on like ten years ago when I did my first personal web page (here’s the oldest one I can find in the Wayback Machine). I’ll prolly get off my butt and do some real work on the look-and-feel of this site. It would be about time, don’t you think.
OK, enough rambling for now. I’m off for a seven-mile run.
Tags: podcastercon2006, podcasting
