Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Blogging

  • PodCamp NYC Needs Your BRAIN

    Chris Brogan has a thing he calls Friend-Sourcing; others have called it collaboration, the wisdom of the crowd, etc. Regardless of what you call it, here’s the situation at PodCamp NYC. The event is moving along smoothly except for one thing. Due to liability and regulations which they have little control over, the New School cannot grant Internet access to PodCamp NYC. After all the lawsuits about the RIAA going after colleges recently, I can’t blame them one bit – PodCamp is a great social movement and a great learning opportunity, but if I were the dean of the New School, I don’t know that I could risk the potential of a lawsuit – justified or not – from the RIAA. One lawsuit could literally put you out of business.

    So, the short version is that PodCamp NYC needs a wi-fi solution (and the RIAA are a bunch of boobs). Some options being explored are things like a permanent dedicated line from a fixed wireless vendor, but I KNOW there are other solutions out there. There was an episode of Geek Brief TV a while back when Cali had a Wi-Fi access point with an EVDO card slot that she used as their permanent wireless solution at home. If I remember correctly, it delivered close to 1 Mbps downstream. I think she said the solution was about $300; a few of those floating around and you’d have coverage. It wouldn’t be OC-3 quality, but it’d be better than going dark.

    At BarCamp Boston, a takeaway from that event was that if you give a bunch of geeks a solution, they tend to point out the flaws in it, but if you give them a problem to solve, they LOVE taking ownership and making it WORK.

    So, how can YOU help to solve the blackout at PodCamp NYC?

  • Your show is you. You are not your show.

    In a conversation with Bryan Person last night, we were discussing why I was even setting up this web site, since I already devote a large amount of time to the Financial Aid Podcast. The essence of discussion was simply this:

    Your show is you. You are not your show.

    Your show is you. Unless you’re podcasting with someone else or a team, as in the case of the many couplecasts out there, or shows like Scriggity that have a team behind them, your show is you. You provide the visual, verbal, and textual personality behind your show, and without you, there really wouldn’t be a show, or certainly, the community that currently enjoys your show might have their appreciation be altered or decline without you. Some shows have made the transition successfully to new personalities, such as Rocketboom, but for the most part, if a host discontinues podcasting, the show simply fades away.

    You are not your show. There are a multitude of topics I’d love to be able to bring to the Financial Aid Podcast if it were a personal show, but it’s not. I refrain, because of the divisiveness of it, from discussing politics in any great depth. Religion, taxes, belief systems of any kind, food, recipes, and so forth – all have little or nothing to do with financial aid except as analogies and metaphors, and all are things that at one point or another, I’ve wished I could post something about, but couldn’t because the Financial Aid Podcast wasn’t the right forum for it.

    That’s what this site is. Don’t get me wrong – the Financial Aid Podcast will continue to be my flagship media focus in virtually every way, but when I want to go off topic, here is where I’ll be. For example, I think the George Foreman Grill is a lousy grill. It really is. What it’s good at is making grilled sandwiches, panini, etc., but as a grill, it has a hard time with anything thicker than a slice of bread.

    The idea behind this site came from two sources – Mitch Joel for encouraging me to create a digital identity independent of the podcast, and C.C. Chapman, who already manages several distinct digital identities, and whose template I’m more or less copying.

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