Quiet moment at home after a whirlwind starting with the Podcast Expo and ending with a friend’s bachelor party last night. The boy’s asleep. It’s very very quiet.
The Podcast Expo was a blast. Met many great folks, saw old friends, and even did some interviews that I’ll try to get online soon as — what else — a podcast. These include the Box Populi guys, Craig Syverson of GruntMedia, and an informal discussion with Brent Izutsu from Stanford on iTunes U about our respective experiences with iTunes U.
One highlight was meeting the Rocketboom folks. At the awards ceremony at the end of Day 2 someone wanted to introduce me to the person responsible for the NY Times podcasts. On the way he bumped into some folks he knew, introduced me, then had me stay with them while he fetched the NY Times person.
The woman looked familiar… it was Joanne Colan from Rocketboom. Hello! It took longer to realize who the fellow was… Andrew Baron, of course. They were nice as could be. Andrew impressed me with how genuine and wide-eyed interested he was. And with his twang just love the way he says “Rocketboom”.
He and I were soon joined by the NY Times person and one discussion was potential directions for NYTimes.com podcasts and vidcasts. What a fun challenge! New media and old media. Inspired by Rocketboom I imagined man-on-the-street videos supplementing written stories. How about giving cameras or recorders to stringers? What if these stringers were in local markets that the NY Times has supplements for such as the Bay Area?
Andrew Baron’s keynote the following morning prompted the following notes…
In ‘04 he jumped into politics to help stop Bush. He worked on the Edwards campaign to put video online rather than distributing DVDs. He had an ah-hah moment when users didn’t complain about accessing the video. Broadband had reached the tipping point. Already blogging, he wondered how a fun site such as BoingBoing could be done as video.
He uses a wiki for his ongoing FAQs, reviews/articles, and also for feedback from his audience. By providing tools like this his audience feels like they “own” the show.
He’s currently experimenting with DotSUB which allows people to subtitle his videos. The intent is that people will translate into multiple languages. This has fantastic potential for close captioning our UC Berkeley videos. I wonder if we can get the timecoded transcript back?
He got into Rocketboom’s statistics, and advertising potential. I believe they command upwards to $80k per week for ads that they also help produce. Wow. He imagined a time when Disney will have an audience of 10,000 for a show, and advertisers will drool over being able to target this hardcore audience.
Hope to post some more about the Podcast Expo later.
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