(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.