Photo of Me at PodcastExpo
30 Sep 2006 in Podcast, PodcastExpo by Garrick
(Me, Kris Smith, Rick Klau, Eric Olson, and many others at Dinner)
Big thanks go out to;
- Kris Smith - for letting me hang out with him all weekend and running the best session of the conference.
- Tim Coyne - for some amazing conversation.
- Dave Slusher - for dropping zen wisdom all weekend (”there is no good and bad - only relevant to you or irrelevant”, “statistically nobody is listening to your podcast”) and hosting a great BBQ.
I completely agree with Tim Elliott’s and impression of the event:
“I was a bit disappointed in the lack of advancement in the podcasting world over the past year.”
Tim’s right, it isn’t just in the vendors. As a community, the most vocal podcasters are still stuck on the same questions: the name of the thing, measuring success/value, justifying their continued involvement. Disheartening.
I made a number of laps around the expo floor over the 2 days - generally stalling out at the LA Podcasters booth and chatting with Tim Coyne. The other booths seemed to be selling one of the following;
- Stuff I already have that works great
- Stuff I won’t ever use
- Stuff that doesn’t make sense
- Snake oil
I left thinking there are 3 problems with the expo as it exists currently;
- It’s serving 2 separate cultures; those that love podcasting and those that missed the first dot com rush
- It’s too niche. As evidence by the expo floor, there’s just not enough innovation happening within the podcasting-specific space year over year to be interesting. Now, if the context was expanded just a hair to anything-RSS we’d start to see far more interesting things. Plus, it’d give larger media brands a better justification for attending.
- Too many logos with the word ‘pod’ in a different color than the rest of the company name.
Comments (1 Comment)
Tim Bourquin added these pithy words on Oct 01 06 at 11:10 pmThanks for the post Garrick. Thanks very much for coming to the Expo.
I definitely see the Expo expanding to include more general “consumer creation” topics (or whatever the term is - I haven’t found anything I like that describes the creativity behind podcasting, video blogging, etc.) For many of us who have been podcasting since the beginning (just over 2 years?), it seems like old news. But I think we have to remember that this is just in it’s infancy. As it grows and matures, we’ll start to see innovation grow as well.
Podcasting still has a very long way to go - even to be able to subscribe to one in an easy way that we can all explain to our parents and grandparents has yet to happen.
I also think that as it matures, we’ll see less of the word “pod” in new company names.
Tim Bourquin, Founder
Podcast & Portable Media Expo
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