Photo of Me at PodcastExpo

(Dave, Victor and myself)

(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;

1. Stuff I already have that works great
2. Stuff I won’t ever use
3. Stuff that doesn’t make sense
4. Snake oil

I left thinking there are 3 problems with the expo as it exists currently;

1. It’s serving 2 separate cultures; those that love podcasting and those that missed the first dot com rush
2. 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.
3. Too many logos with the word ‘pod’ in a different color than the rest of the company name.