PodCamp MidWest – Highlights

PodCamp MidWest has begun and if you are in the Kansas City area it’s not too late to head over. I am posting photos to Flickr, SnapFoo, and updating Twitter live. Twitter friends lunch meetup today, check out the tweets to find out where. Live blog below – refresh to see latest.

• Flickr Photos
• SnapFoo Pics
• Linuxchic’s Twitter
• TechMonkey’s Twitter

Session HighlightsPodcasting Like Pro with Brady GoodmanA podcast can’t be too short. If the audience wants more, they will be back for the next episode. Don’t force a certain show length, just let it happen.Consider creating a table of contents for long format shows either on your blog (show notes) or creating chapters through iTunes in the actual podcast itself so people can just skip to the topic they are interested in if they want.Show notes help your search engine results, trackback links and more. An audio podcast can’t be crawled by search engines so show notes not only give your audience links to follow and more information about the content of your episode but also gives you traffic from keywords in search engines.Get to the point, don’t spend 5 minutes doing cute unprofessional things like, “Is this thing on?”. Get the listener hooked with some content before the banter. Give your audience a reason to listen.Sell sponsorships: ie Do a cooking show? Get it sponsored by your nitche like recipes.com. Sell packages, banners, audio, links… don’t look for fortune, just sell the ads. You don’t have to go global, pound the pavement and hit up your local merchants and websites. Don’t get hooked on your subscriber numbers and stats – sell to your nitche – tell your potential sponsors their customers are the ones listening so they need their brand on your show.Listen to your own podcast.Commit to improving, commit to being on time with your episodes, commit to being a professional.Social Networking – Life in the fishbowl and beyond – Michael BaileyBreakout Session (Conversational)A great mix of people participated in this break out session facilitated by Michael Bailey of Mobasoft. With introductions came a lot of new Twitter friends. Questions raised by those new to social networking and media was how long does content last on the internet? Responses contributed to a conversation including technical information on webservers, the Way Back Machine, and censoring what you say. It was hard to stop the conversation and move on. =)I didn’t get a change to live blog the next two sessions since TechMonkey and I were giving some of our own. There were several people recording sessions for their own casts and sites and we will include the links to them when we get them. Lane Fournerat live streamed our WordPress for Beginners session as well as recorded it to upload later.Just Press Record with Michael BaileyMichael brought out several mics, headphones, and a mixer and jacked them all into his MacBook so participants could get a hands on demo of podcasting equipment. Lots of learning and sharing went on here.Most people are not aware that the equipment that they can purchase to produce professional sounding podcasts is inexpensive. For $200 or less a podcaster can outfit a home studio with a mixer and a professional microphone. While you don’t need this equipment to record a podcast it helps the quality of the recording and if you have more than one person you can control their levels independently with a mixer. The software Michael demo’ed on his MacBook was Audacity, a powerful and free audio application and runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows.The hands on session seemed to be a big hit and once someone broke the ice many people came up to check out the equipment, ask questions, and share their experiences.Video Podcasting Info with Lane FourneratLane has been live streaming from PodCamp Midwest today at Justin.TV and he shares his expertise on how to record video and where you can post it on the net. He showed how you can make money creating internet video with Associated Content and ExpoTV.com. He has posted tutorials on software and video making made with his webcam at Associated Content and created video reviews of products and movies at Expotv.com with each site paying for user contributed content. Lane tells us how easy it is to create video with your computer.Lane likes the Logitec QuickCam webcams for their ease of use. The software (runs on Windows) creates AVI formatted video with a decent compression rate for uploading straight to the web. For converting video formats Lane recommended SUPER, a free , efficient and easy to use video encoder.