After the morning keynote I went to three sessions- "Interviews that ROCK: Getting the Most out of your guests" with Heidi Miller of Heidi Miller Presents, and "Guerilla Love: How to get your name out there, share the love of life and make 'em smile" with Karen "KFC" Blanchette of Skydiver Girls and PodChick fame, and the legal panel that my husband was on. I'm going to refrain from commenting on the third panel because I'm biased, but the first two were terrific. Heidi Miller's presentation on interviewing was hands-on and useful; I got lots of good notes and I'm planning on going to her site later to look at the full presentation again. It's something I'm going to file and I'm sure I'll refer to it later. The second was just as good but a lot more fun. KFC is a well-known podcaster who employs guerilla marketing techniques such as stickering, t-shirts and even stamping her cash with her podcast URL. Her husband sprayed the audience with a leafblower filled with 100 stamped (and glittered!) one-dollar bills, just to drive home the point. Now her podcast will get publicity when we spend our dollar bills- and when the next person spends them, and the next, and so on. Get the point? Very clever.
I was also lucky enough to have lunch with a podcaster named Heidi Estrin who does the Book of Life podcast over at Jewishbooks.blogspot.com, a podcast featuring interviews with writers of Jewish-interest childrens' books. I think this podcast will turn out to be a great resource for me at my synagogue job and something I'm looking forward to sharing with my coworkers and my patrons.
The conference overall seems pretty high energy and intense. I saw a very diverse crowd of independent podcasters and corporate players of different stripes- corporate podcasters, insurance people, lawyers, vendors of all kinds. I found the exhibits to be pretty bland although I did sign up for a free online subscription to Blogger and Podcaster Magazine. There were a couple of individual podcasters I'd hoped to meet but I've pretty much given up on that since it would be like finding a needle in a haystack but you never know, there's always tomorrow.
What, I hear you ask, does all this have to do with book reviews and reading? Well it has to do with new media and new ways of disseminating information, and with the production and issues surrounding those sources of information. And going to this conference has given me some great topics to write about in the future and some solid connections with information and content creators which can be leveraged in all kinds of ways. Just trying to be a better librarian and a better blogger by educating myself and my audience about what's going on out there.
2 comments:
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it! Now, I just need to add a leaf blower to my talk!
Oh I hope it didn't sound like I didn't have fun at your session! :-) *really surprised and pleased that you read & commented*!
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