PodCamp Perth 2007

I came, I saw, I learnt, I presen­ted and throughly enjoyed myself, even if over too quickly.

The most sur­pris­ing thing, was that while the first Pod­Camp in Aus­tralia was sup­posed to of been organ­ized by Adam Pur­cell and Jared Mad­den. I met them early in the day, but they dis­ap­peared into the crowd and did not even present. The organ­iz­ing of Pod­Camp Perth 2007 seemed to be handled by Bron­wen (of Per­th­Norg fame) and Simone (of EnjoyPerth fame), with the help of a large num­ber of Perth people.

Cameron Reilly did the unkey­note bit, with a mix of per­sonal his­tory of the Pod­cast Net­work, tech­no­logy, how old media does not get new media and geeks for greater good. It was a good story, and Cameron is a great story teller, even if I still needs prac­tice with his new Mac­Book Pro. Cameron asked the how pod­casts could move out of the radio broad­cast mold and then promptly answered the ques­tion, com­munity. Using blogs, twit­ter and second life a small num­ber of pod­cast con­sumers are get­ting involved.

Due to my caf­feine addic­tion and my self destruct­ing cof­fee machine (a long story, which might be worthy of a seper­ate blog post). I missed the next ses­sion to get a fix.

Duncan Reilly was talk­ing brand­ing in the digital age, it got me think­ing about why I blog as NickCowie.com. Yes it invades my per­sonal space, but only as much as I let it and in return I get a raised per­sonal pro­file. The main dis­ad­vant­age is it would be dif­fi­cult to sell, my pro­file, unlike blog­ging under a pseudonym.

A quick lunch, a few snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion and it was back to the sessions.

I refuse to blog on polit­ical mat­ters (I have a post titled Inter­net fil­ter­ing and Net­Alert sit­ting in my drafts folder, which is unlikely to ever get pub­lished.), but I went to the ses­sion, by Stilgher­rian on the fed­eral elec­tion and web 2.0, because I have an interest in the topic. Polit­ical parties with the excep­tion on a cer­tain sen­ator from queens­land, do not get web 2.0, neither does none of the major media out­lets. It is not the You­Tube elec­tion, it is the elec­tion of big polit­ical parties put­ting up videos on You­Tube to get free tele­vi­sion coverage.

One thing that sur­prised me, was the num­ber of people shocked that act­iv­ists from either party might use web based social net­work­ing to influ­ence voters. I would be suprised if that did not hap­pen in the last 4 years or more in the US and it should be hap­pen­ing now in Australia.

It was good to see both Josef Goebbels (by Stilgher­rian) and Che Guevara (by Cameron) get­ting men­tioned in present­a­tions at Pod­Camp. Goebbels because his 19 prin­ciples of pro­pa­ganda are still the prin­ciples of every polit­ical cam­paign run in this coun­try for the past 50 years. Guevara because he is icon of revolu­tion­ar­ies, the num­ber of people he had killed did get a mention.

Then I did my ses­sion on Social Net­work­ing and the mobile web. Unfor­tu­nately it ran a little over­time and I missed, the begin­ning of the final ses­sion of the day. Which was from Microsoft’s pro­fes­sional geek Nick Hodge. Nick provided a inter­est­ing insight in to blog­ging inside a cor­por­ate cul­ture. (I avoid that by not men­tion­ing work here). It appears to work with a code of eth­ics, peer pres­sure and self cen­sor­ship with Nick and most of his fel­low blog­gers from Microsoft.

Then it was all over, every­body helped out in quick tidy up and it was of to the pub, to con­sume the pro­ceeds of the tshirt sales and have a good con­ver­sa­tion or three.

The crowd was a little dif­fer­ent from the Bar­Camp crowd, miss­ing were most of the Port80 web geeks. The lib­rar­i­ans, edu­cat­ors and blog­gers I met at Bar­Camp where back along with a mix of people from less tech­nical back­grounds than I expec­ted, how­ever, they were as pas­sion­ate as any hard­core web geek gathering.

It was an inter­est­ing day, the sur­pris­ing thing that after five ses­sions includ­ing one I did, I was not tired, in fact it was a very relax­ing way to spend the day. I am not a heavy con­sumer of pod­casts and I believe I have a great voice for silent movies, so I am unlikely to start pod­cast­ing soon. So I avoided the hands on ses­sions and choose the ses­sions that inter­ested me, I learnt and it got me think­ing, which is what I wanted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 7:31 pm and is filed under conferences, Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.