Category: Conferences

Podcasters Across Borders was incredible this weekend, with so many great presentations, so many good friends, and lots of discussion about podcasting. It was the quintessential community-centered event, deep inside the fishbowl, in the echo chamber, and that’s a good thing.

Events like PAB are essential for podcasters to recharge, to regroup, to get together and share and reaffirm that podcasting is still the exciting venture it was when they started. It’s a source of energy, a source of inspiration to help people motivate or remotivate themselves to produce new media.

On the way home, Bryan Person and I stopped at a McDonald’s in Oneonta, New York. There, a senior in high school who had just graduated came up to me at the table (Bryan was still in line) and asked, “Hey, my friends and I saw your shirt – what’s a podcast?”. (for the record, I was wearing the PAB2007 shirt, skillfully designed by Nico Pin of Snowy Day Design)

Full stop.

Here’s someone who is probably as ideal a candidate for new media as you can get, and they don’t know what a podcast is. When I said “it’s an MP3 internet radio show” she got it immediately as to what it was, but didn’t know what kind of content was available.

We have a lot of work to do.

The conclusion of PAB kicks off the promotional season of PodCamp Boston 2 for the PCB team. We’re rested, recharged, and ready to bring new media to the mainstream, and the best way we can do that is to do as much outreach as possible. PodCamp Boston 2 will ideally be the largest, best, most exciting PodCamp ever – until the one that follows it. We’re going to take the lessons of previous PodCamps and put together what we hope to be the best community UnConference we can, and we’ll need your help.

In the weeks to come, we’re going to be talking a lot more about what we need for PodCamp Boston 2, but immediately, we’d love your help in directing people to the registration page. The URL is easy to remember: https://www.PodCampBoston.org/register

We as podcasters may be missing half a million or more audience members, and we don’t even know it.

Here’s the thing I noticed all over Stockholm, and other European PodCampers confirmed in other countries – there were an awful lot of people listening. They had headphones jacked into devices all over the place.

FEW of those devices were iPods. Of the ones that were MP3 players, the iRiver T series seemed to be the player of choice.

For every MP3 player I saw, I saw 10 mobile phones being used as media devices. Mobile phones that were spinning up music, content, and everything primarily from telco carriers.

I also learned that there are an awful lot of handsets equipped to be able to listen to podcasts – most of the Nokia N and E series phones supposedly can – and that the only thing missing is a way to get the listener to subscribe easily. Right now, asking the user to key in an RSS feed is far below optimal, but if we can figure out a way to get one click subscribe working on those handsets, then podcasts can join the music on headphones everywhere.

If you had the opportunity to have your show – audio or video – on half a million more devices, to half a million more listeners, would you? And how much would that be worth to your show?