PodCamp AZ onsite report

report by Bill Palmer

Who knew how much fun the desert could be? I’ve been to new media conferences all across the country (including PodCamps in four different States), but while PodCamp Arizona had been circled on my calendar each of the past two years, it wasn’t until this past weekend that the stars finally aligned and allowed me to make my way out to Tempe for what turned out to be one of the stronger PodCamp offerings I’ve attended.



For those uninitiated, PodCamp is a series of “unconferences” founded on the BarCamp premise of sessions being led by attendees themselves as opposed to professional speakers, strong encouragement to go ahead and politely bail on any session isn’t doing anything for you in the hopes of finding a more suitable one down the hall, and the general assumption that the most vital conversations are likely to be the unscripted ones in the hallways between sessions anyway.



Because each PodCamp is organized by local leaders with just a handful of overriding guidelines, each one ends up being of a different structure than the next. The Arizona team structured things more formally than in some other cities, with the majority of time slots filled-in in advance by attendees who provided advance notice that they wanted to speak. But still, the thirty minutes of downtime between each block of sessions made it clear that those “hallway conversations” were intended to be as much a part of the Tempe 2009 experience as they were at the original PodCamp Boston back in 2006.



While the “Pod” in the name of the event gives hint of its strong connection to podcasting and podcasters, the sheer number of sessions devoted to topics that had nothing to do with podcasting was striking. No fewer than five sessions were dedicated to WordPress, seemingly a sign of both blogging being alive and well in the age of social networking, and the number of podcasters who’ve decided that their show should have a landing page on the web of some kind.



The sessions that I attended ranged from tips on how to promote yourself differently on Twitter vs. Facebook, to how to barter your way into compensation for your podcast, to how to promote yourself through comment marketing, to how to not promote yourself. I guess here in 2009, self-publishing still necessarily means self-promotion. The majority of sessions I attended involved some kind of PowerPoint or Keynote slide slow, which left it feeling a bit less unconference-y than some I’ve been to in the past. But then again, the most interesting session I attended was one in which a guy in the front row kept jumping in, then a guy in the back row started asking the guy in the front row questions, and a guy sitting on the floor kept providing comic relief, all while the presenter took it all in stride.



So what did I learn from this rather-organized-yet-still-sufficiently-spontaneous event? Suffice it to say that the things I took away with me were overwhelmingly ideas that popped into my head over the weekend that were only tangentially related to the advice and ideas that were being kicked around by others. But that’s the main reason I still attend these kinds of events – they get me thinking that no amount of staring at my own walls, or even kicking around ideas with my own team and my own advisers would.

Learn more about the PodCamp AZ at PodCampAZ.org.