To me, at this particular conference because of the focus on how blogs are shaping communities, I went in with the idea of talking about using podcasting to help build up a community of listeners around particular topic or issue: students using it help other students; tech folks helping each other; folks providing information for nonprofits; entertainment from your community that you can find in the mainstream.

But I sort of felt compelled once we started to talk about the tools because of the questions. And I think I spent too much time on that part. If that was going to be the case, then we should have offered a podcasting 101 for the folks interested in getting started and a best practices session where experienced users could discuss the how-tos and help each other grow. We could have even added a third as an intro for people who want to find good stuff. Podcasters could put together 30-second to 1-minute promos of their podcasts and some of their favorites and discuss what they liked about them. Then they could have shown people how to subscribe and listen.

The last part is where we’re losing most people. iTunes has been a big help with one-click subscription, but there have got to be easier ways for people to subscribe via a Web browser.

Podcast Alley helps with determining popular shows, but, frankly, it’s still hard to sift through all 15,000 or so.

Dave, no worries. It’s good to learn from experience. And I hope to see you at PodcasterCon in January!

Ryan, I don’t agree with you totally, but I do agree that subsequent conferences – this and others – should seperate the topic into two issues. How to listen and how to produce are each big topics now, and going between them causes whiplash. However, I think the listening session should always come first in the sequence so that people who get excited about production from that session can attend the production one. In a way, I hate seperating them because part of the power is that the audience is empowered enough to produce but it probably has to be done.

VCG, I don’t know if it is students today or not. I can’t claim I’d be any different if it was my self from 20 years ago in the same spot. But still, taking advantage of situations when they fall in your lap is a good life skill that should be learned as early as possible and then used as often as possible.

Herb, thanks. I was worried you’d find that antagonistic. I think like I just said, splitting this into 2 panels or 2 panels plus a hands-on workshop would have taken care of a lot of issues. I do appreciate your efforts and think that with the experience of this, we can make it fantastic next time. This is really just the point at which this type of session fails to scale. A year ago, like at Bloggercon Stanford most people in the room were both audience and podcasters and now we just have to deal with the differences in the participants and how their needs are changing.

The professor you mentioned was Dr. Sybril Bennett from Belmont University in Nashville. I believe this her blog http://forum.belmont.edu/drsyb/

I’ve spoken and written about this before and I’m sure no one disagrees with me in theory, but we need to become more creative in evangelizing podcasting – not just how to create one, but possibly more importantly, how to download and listen to one.

This was the perfect opportunity to get non-geeks interested in podcasting – and maybe doing it. So, it’s not that we should separate out the podcasters; I think that’s the wrong approach. Most podcasters right now are geeks or tweakers. What we really need to do is kick the podcasters out of the room and let the focus be on the non-podcasters. I think that sort of approach would’ve leveraged the great “For all people” atmosphere of the conference.

In general, podcasters need to become more creative and careful in how they evangelize podcasting to non-geek non-podcasters. Podcasting is much more nuanced, technical and unapproachable than blogging ever was. The old model won’t work.

I also agree about the room, too, which was much too big. I was going to record about 10 minutes of the lecture and post it right then, but with the tech issues, I had to punt that part.

My suggestion for the format next year would be stick the podcasters in a much smaller room that’s better lit and focus on best practices in equipment, developing content and marketing. This may happen in January at PodcasterCon. I’ll be there, and I hope to see you.

As I said during the session, I’m not a sound engineer and I would have loved to have learned more about production.

I brought in Robert Kirk for a session on equipment and it was awesome.

I’d love to work with you, so keep in touch!