I’ve registered for PodCamp Ohio on June 28th, which takes place in Columbus. Podcamp is all about podcasting - having some kind of beyond-written blog with syndication. I think PodCamps aren’t going to be my best venue – I’d like to try more of a barcamp. It would be ideal if there was another BlogPhiladelphia, alas I’ve heard nothing and the people who I might have expected to be involved aren’t talking about it. Oh, well.
I’ve been thinking about presenting something at the PodCamp to accumulate more for item 30 on my 43things. I’ll be adding to this count shortly with another Philly PHP meetup presentation at the end of April, this time on PHP testing. For the PodCamp presentation (which is really more of a group-leading, since it’s an “unconference”), I was thinking about talking about software tools for podcasters.
I wrote up a whole pitch for the tool presentation to submit to the PodCamp Ohio guys to see if they’ll take me. Here’s what I have:
Produce your podcast more efficiently. Learn about new tools from other podcasters that use them. Go home from this session with a list of software tools and services to try for your next podcast.
* Learn about hosted and self-installed blogging tools and feed publishers.
* Discover commercial and free audio and video editing applications.
* Learn of a/v compression systems.
* Learn what web hosts people use.
* Learn about distribution services used by popular podcasters.
The idea is to stick with the software side of things and get people talking about what tools they use. I think I’ll start off by listing a few categories like the ones above, and come up with a list of tools for each category that I know of and how they work just to get things rolling. Ideally, I’d like to have the session be a rapid-fire callout of people’s favorite tools and what one thing they like about them.
I think the audience participation format of the unconference is a largely untapped resource at big pay-for conferences and I’d like to encourage everyone in the session to take advantage. Maybe I could bring some candy bars to throw at to people who chime in.
It would also be neat to tailor the presentation toward the audience on the fly. So if most of the attendees are just starting to break in to podcasting, they might be more interested in free open source solutions. Whereas if the attendees have podcasts already that they’d like to improve on by stepping up their software, the session could lean more in that direction. Plus there’s Windows versus Mac versus hosted versus service… Lots of good separations between groups such that it’ll be a challenge to maintain interest for one half of the group while targeting the other.
So my real question is about time. The slots they’re allotting on the PodCamp Ohio site are for 30 minutes or 60 minutes. I could certainly fill 30 minutes with tool discussion. Do you think there are enough tools to cover to fill 60 minutes? There probably are, easy, especially if we’ve got to cover different ranges of platforms and price. Still, I think I might rather emphasize the speedy nature of the session to get a list that everyone could take home and investigate on their own. There’s nothing worse than having someone drone on for 5 minutes about how they used some application and they couldn’t get it to do whatever and so they were wondering blah blah blah, or they launch into a “here’s how you do X” when only the single person out of 50 who asked is actually interested. Perhaps the session could spawn smaller spin-off connections, which is another great value of the one-on-one nature of the *camps.
I haven’t put my bid in for this session yet, because I’m wondering if anything thinks it’s viable or worthwhile. Thoughts? Would you come hear a bunch of people talk about podcasting tools?
