Podcasting

First things first, my number one fan says maybe I was too hard on Amanda Congdon in my post about Tuesday’s keynote session. Which was not my intent. I enoy Rocketboom, think she is tremendously talented and wish her and her colleagues all the success in the world. I just didn’t get a lot out of her session, and thought it was a bit basic for the Syndicate audience. But she clearly has a lot of passion for what she is doing, and others did enjoy it, so there you have it.

On to Wednesday’s sessions.

Steve Gillmor’s "It’s the Gestures, Stupid" — The title of this session is homage to James Carville’s "It’s the economy, stupid" phrase from the first Clinton election oh so many years ago. As Gillmor pointed out, Carville’s "stupid" (and his as well presumably) was self-reflective — a reminder to himself of what was important, not a commentary on others. Nonetheless, there were quite a lot of us in the room with looks of total incomprehension during Gillmor’s talk. Who all felt a lot better when Doc Searls commented in his closing session that even he doesn’t fully understand what Gillmor is talking about.

So, I am not even going to try and summarize what Gillmor covered in his session, other than to tell you that I *think* the gestures concept and Gillmor’s Gesture Bank (www.gesturebank.com) is an open source model for the aggregation of meta data. I’ve signed up for the public beta because I am now curious. I’m sure more than a few folks did the same. And perhaps that was the primary goal all along. We don’t get it yet, but we will…..

Gillmor was followed by Steven Schwartz of Reuters, "Syndicating the Publishing World." This was a typical polished corporate presentation, with slides and all, that might as well have been titled "Why Reuters loves the Web."  Schwartz was extremely good at staying on message — I lost track of the number of times he told us that Reuters is the "world’s largest news agency" 🙂 

Thinking about it afterward, the two sessions – Gillmor and Schwartz – couldn’t have been more different. The contrast between Gillmor’s informal style and Schwartz’s corporate demeanor was marked. I didn’t understand everything (much!) of what Gillmor said, but I got the gist that there were some important ideas lurking in "gestures." Whereas, I understood pretty much Schwartz’s whole pitch, but I could have gotten the same information from a Reuters fact sheet.

Tags: Steve Gillmor, Reuters, Syndicate, Corante, gestures, Gesture Bank

Stormhoek Sauvignon Blanc is nice, but the Pinot Grigio is FINE. The wines were served at KnowNow’s reception tonight (and a later party which I intended to go to but just crashed). I wish I could figure out a reasonable party for a Stormhoek gig, Wonder if they’d go for a non-geek dinner…..I could definitely do a a dog show thing….

The Edelman session this morning was by far the best today, at least for a marketing/comms person. Here’s the summary of the other sessions I attended today.

Building Brands Through Compelling Podcast Content, Paul Gillin (moderator), Scott Sigler, Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger (Mommycast.com) and Audrey Reed-Granger (Whirlpool). Overall this was an interesting session, but the thing that sticks with me the most is Reed-Granger’s narrative of how she got the podcast approved. The critical elements: the trust (and good track record) she had established with corporate leadership combined with a clear editorial calendar and vision for the podcast. The discussion on how to include/integrate corporate interests/sponsors was also interesting; the podcasters clearly came down on the side of a clear separation between church and state. I was also impressed by the passion they all had for podcasting.

Grokking the Big Picture, Paul Gillin (moderator), David Geller, Mike Davidson, Dave Sifry, Eric Elia. Most of this session just seemed a rehash from other conferences, other arguments. Interesting if you’ve never heard or read it before but otherwise ? Blah blah blah. Most interesting comment: Mike Davidson’s that RSS was missing the "oh wow" factor, perhaps part of the reason for slow uptake. Not to mention RSS is still too hard for the average bear. See what I mean. Nothing that new.

Sifry did announce a deal with Paramount for Technorati to aggregate the conversation around selected Paramount films, which will be hosted on the Paramount sites. This sounds very interesting, plan to keep my eye on it. Then there was a long discussion of full versus partial feed.Yawn. Nothing new. There are arguments to be made for both. It’s an easier decision for full feed if you are not trying to monetize the blog.  When they got to questions the sessions turned into "speaking from the floor"  and I got kinda bored. Sorry 🙁 

This session did spark my interest in clarifying the differences among all the different news aggregators (Techmeme, Digg, Newsvine et al), so watch for that this month.

David Weinberger, Tagging. I enjoyed this session, which was held more as a conversation than a presentation. Gist: The power of tagging isn’t in the self tagging that an author does of his/her own material. That is just simple metadata. The richness comes from users tagging material that they find interesting in ways that are meaningful to them using social networking tools like flickr and del.icio.us. Because the tagging is public, we get the social effects — others use the same tag for similar but not necessarily the same type of content and tag the same content with additional tags meaningful to them. Clusters develop around tags, and so forth. Suddenly, your tag for an article introduces you to all sorts of other material. Subscribe to the tag and you get a steady stream of stuff that you might never find in normal reading of Web sites and blogs.

Short story: this session cleared up a lot of my confusion about the value of tagging. Things to ponder: the ownership of content changes now that folks can classify things the way they want (bottom up versus top down). How other people tag our content can start to define, even change, our online personas.

Halley Suitt, Top Ten Sources. This session was mostly an introduction to Halley’s new venture Top Ten Sources. She talked a little bit about the issues raised when they launched the site re: syndicating other bloggers’ content and answered questions about their business model. She also read two past blog posts, one written when her father died and another on alpha males.

Amanda Congdon, Rocketboom. I didn’t get too much out of this session. I sense that Amanda is more comfortable in front of the camera than behind the podium. The content was also wrong for the Syndicate audience — there was nothing that most didn’t already know.

Seen today: Fellow Corante bloggers Vin Crosbie and Tish Grier, Brian Oberkirch, Tom Biro, Paul Gillin, Dana McCurley, Eric Schwartzman, Joel Richman and Josh Hallet

Shopping accomplished: a pair of cute sandals on sale at Coach (hotel is on Madison Ave.)

Wednesday: the bad boys of PR and more.

Tags: Syndicate, Corante, RSS, podcast, podcasting, blogging,  tagging