For the first time in my life, I just attended Podcamp DC in Rosslyn, Virginia. Before this, I had attended Widget DevCamp and that didn’t seem like anything appealing to me and had an essence of being more for developers. However, today’s meetup, to me, was something more for developers, designers, marketers, journalists, etc. and had something for everyone.
All in all, I don’t think it was a bad conference. In fact, it was pretty good. I got to meet some folks and able to reconnect, but didn’t really do that much networking like I’d wanted to, but the sessions were most informative. What would have made this “unconference” great is if these sessions were held multiple times throughout the day to prevent attendees from having to make tough decisions. I know that there were sessions where I’d like to attend a podcasting and social media talks, but felt that if I adhered to the “two feet” rule, it wouldn’t be productive as I’d miss out on some pretty cool stuff.
I did learn a little bit of stuff during these sessions though. It was enjoyable to have these discussions without any real structure and make it open to the masses to talk about these issues in forum-style. But what exactly did I learn? Just some simple stuff…
- eBay is good – best place to find cheap (priced) equipment for podcasting.
- Twitter is going to be a topic talked about at other social media “unconferences” for a little bit longer.
- LinkedIn is more of a popular tool than I thought.
- There are still some online marketing folks that don’t know too much about social media – great to see them at these events.
What’s good for me to see at Podcamp DC is the amount of people who happen to be there that have a strong knowledge of social media trends and applications that enjoy sharing the knowledge with those individuals who are lacking it. The networking opportunities that Podcamp DC allowed was a welcome site and I even enjoyed the presentations by, what I’ve designated the keynote speaker, Christopher Penn – the organizer of Podcamp. His insight into how new media marketing can be used by companies and individuals to promote their brands was an invigorating talk and his promotion of LinkedIn was quite valuable…not to mention he was quite exuberent, which really kept my attention.
All in all, I think it was a pretty good event. I filmed a couple of the sessions I was in and will be posting them shortly on this blog and on other sites. Now I gotta prepare for my next event – Tech Cocktail 2 over at MCCXXIII on Thursday. w00t!
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