It’s been a long time since I wrote anything here. I’m not on a schedule or anything, but some activity might be nice.
So for the three people who read this (I have no idea of the number – BTW, but I know my sister reads it … ) here’s what has been going on.
The robotics team is done with building the robot and it has been shipped to the first competition. They make everyone ship the robot by the same deadline so that all teams have exactly the same time to build theirs. So we wait three weeks until our competition in Rochester. It’s just as well. We all were pretty burnt-out by the end of the six-week build period.
I just returned home from a weekend in Toronto. I went up to attend Podcamp Toronto a conference of sorts on podcasting. It’s actually not a conference, it’s an un-conference. The Podcamp is based on the Barcamp model, which is a very laid-back sort of thing. Everyone who attends is part of it and if you want to hold a conference on a certain topic, you just sign up and they give you a time slot in a room to do it. You can share it with another host or go it alone. People are free to come and go as well. If you’re in a seminar and decide it’s not what you thought it would be, you’re free to wander out to any other one.
The idea has been around only for a year or so, but has gained a lot of traction. Of course in podcasting history, a year is a long time. There were about three hundred registered attendees and any number who just wandered in. Did I mention it was free? The organizers put it all together with just a few sponsors who paid the expenses. It was held at Ryerson University which is well-known for it’s journalism and media arts. They provided superb video coverage of all the seminars and they can be seen online for anyone who missed them. I’ve watched a few to see some I missed.
But the best part was all the other podcasters I met. Everyone, as different as they were, all were great and the whole weekend was exhilarating.
But I’m home now and as all the talk settles and gets digested about podcasting, I’m a little overwhelmed. I’m way behind on my goal of doing one quality show per week and all the talk about content and monetization and search engine optimization and calls to action and on and on goes through my head, I’m just wondering as if I’m doing the right thing.
I hear others doing two or three podcasts a week. They say they just take a couple hours to do a show and they come out great – award-winning shows with thousands of listeners. I slave away editing for hours and hardly get any closer to a completed show. They say the listeners want personality and listen because of that. If they’re listening to mine for that, heaven help them.
I’ve always said my podcast is not about me, it’s about the music. Is my show so different? I accept low listenership numbers because I realize my focus is local, but for the amount of work I put into it, what do I get out of it? I’m waiting for results…
I don’t know if this post should go here, or maybe I should put it on the podcast page. But for now, I’ll leave it here. I don’t want to panic my listeners. All three of them.
