billpalmer.net

I'm not sure if it's gradual damage from the acid reflux I've had since I was a teenager, the years I spent talking over a computer lab full of collaborating students, or maybe some combination of both, but my voice tends to go out pretty quickly on me. A few years ago when the mainstream media all decided to take a ridiculous interest in one of my side projects, I said yes to every phone interview they offered me...and spent the majority of each day hoarse as a result. And when I first started podcasting back in 2005, I got so excited that I tried to crank out an episode every day - which lasted about a week before I completely lost my voice, put the project on the shelf, and didn't go back to podcasting for about a year.

So these days I try to avoid putting myself in one too many consecutive situations where I have to either talk loudly or sound good while talking for any period of time. When I'm scheduling phone interviews with musicians I never do two on the same day; the rock star I'm talking with may not care how bad I sound, but a good percentage of these interviews ultimately end up on the podcast, and the audience will notice if I sound like something crawled down my throat and died. I try not to even allow them to be on consecutive days if I can help it. Not that, frankly, I get too much say as far as what date and time these interviews typically take place.

So when I woke up this morning with my throat on fire, my first thought was uh-oh, that's not such great timing. Richard Patrick of Filter was calling this morning for an interview that's not only for an iProng Magazine cover story, it's for this upcoming week's cover story, meaning that the odds of being able to reschedule it in time were small. And since Filter's new album is coming out the same day the cover story is coming out, I didn't want to look at the possibility of sliding the Filter story to the next available cover, either. So I did the interview. I made it through ok.

And now you know who's on the cover of the May 13th issue. Hey Man Nice Shot. Take a Picture. Yeah, that Filter. I love putting bands on the cover the day their new album comes out. And I continue to be amazed that in this era of industry paranoia, the major and indie labels are generally willing to trust me with advance copies of the new albums before they're released so I know what I'm talking about during the interviews. For the record, the new Filter record is really strong. I offered them the cover based on the strength of the new single alone, so I guess I got lucky.

Side note: Filter's Richard Patrick is the brother of Robert Patrick, who played the bad guy in Terminator 3. Small world.

But the short of it is that I unwittingly had another phone interview scheduled for tomorrow morning, which I was determined to get through but was secretly (okay not so secretly, dear readers) relieved when I was given word this evening that the band needed to push it back to next week. No worries, since that story isn't scheduled to publish until June. And no, I'm not telling you who they are yet. Except that you've almost definitely heard of them.

Of course this week we didn't have a musician on the cover at all. I'm not going to make a big deal about finally putting a podcaster on the cover, because frankly, it shouldn't have taken this long. We've been slacking in that department, and hopefully the Goodnight Burbank cover story helps begin to correct that. There are more coming. Promise.

Someone will invariably ask, so I'll just go ahead and answer it now: the timing of our first podcasting cover story has nothing to do with the fact that both major podcasting magazines, Podcast User Magazine and Blogger & Podcaster Magazine, have gone on unofficial hiatus. I've always intended to do the occasional iProng podcasting cover story, the schedule just finally worked out properly this week. It'll always important for iProng to provide a good amount of podcasting coverage, but at the same time it'll always be just one of several things we cover. Bottom line is the podcasting industry needs its podcasting-specific magazines, and I'll be smiling wide when both magazines come back to us in full form.

On a personal level, the winds of change seem to be in full effect around here lately, in more ways than one. I've ended up spending a little more time hiding out here in Florida than I was originally planning. Things got so busy with the magazine that I've kept putting off my return, one pushback after another, but now it's time to return to the real world. When walking down to the lake and seeing if you can spot an alligator along the shoreline becomes a daily highlight, it's time to get out of dodge. Monday (assuming I have a voice to speak with) I'll be on the phone all day scouting out potential Hollywood apartments. Feels good. It's time. I plan to be on a plane June 1st if not sooner.

Finally signed off on a media partnership I'd been negotiating with a major music festival for months. They've got an incredible lineup this year. Can't wait to make the announcement next week.

Accomplishment is not the same thing as making a difference, and quite often the accomplishments you're most proud of are things that no one outside of yourself and your immediate circle will ever know about or would even care about anyway. Over the past few months my (professional) accomplishments have begun to take place more in the public eye; for instance I've grown accustomed to people I don't know very well congratulating me on the accomplishment of landing one big name interview after another. But that doesn't mean I've actually made a difference. After all, you don't change anything by managing to be one of dozens interviews some famous person happens to grant during a period of heavy promotion.

A few folks have told me they thought I made a difference back in March when Adam Duritz of Counting Crows laid out his manifesto for the future of the music industry in an iProng Magazine cover story. In fact one musician told me that reading that story caused him to change his strategy for his own band. But if you listen to the audio of that interview, I didn't really have to do anything to get that story out of Duritz; he was going to tell that story to any journalist who wasn't going to cut him off. All I can really take credit for was understanding that what he was saying was important and including it in my story.

But this week was different. I interviewed Ed Roland of Collective Soul for fairly straightforward reasons: I own every album they've ever released, I've seen them in concert too many times to count, and the ten million albums they've sold tells me that readers would be interested as well. Worthwhile for me, worthwhile for the readers, done deal. But somewhere during the interview process I figured it out: Collective Soul was the rare famous band that was in an ideal position to go podsafe with seemingly nothing standing in their way. After all, when the lead singer of the band is also the owner of the record label, there's not likely to be a whole lot of red tape involved. So when Ed started asking me for iPhone buying advice during our interview, and I asked him for his thoughts on podcasting and he simply said "educate me," I took my shot. I told him that we would be using the audio recording of the interview on our podcast, and that it would be great if we could use the latest single as well. And he said yes. Told me to send the details to his people. By golly, it worked.

What does "podsafe" mean? It's pretty straightforward, really. As a podcaster, you don't have the right to play someone's copyrighted song in your show unless you have specific permission to do so. The popular notion that you can use up to thirty seconds of a song without permission, or that you acquire the right to use the song simply by buying the CD? Nothing more than unfortunate myths.

Granting permission on a case by case basis would be a nightmare for everyone involved, so people with more foresight than me created a Podsafe Music Network, in effect a clearing house for granting blanket rights for using songs in podcasts. Indie artists have flocked to it. In fact some of them have built their entire careers out of getting their songs played on podcasts and then seeing that popularity turn into album sales (the exact same reason bands send their songs to FM radio). But because all four major record labels apparently attended the same conference where someone spent a great deal of time and effort misinforming them about what a podcast actually is, getting any of the major labels to allow their artists' music to become podsafe is roughly equivalent to throwing eggs at a brick wall - you can keep trying all day long, but at the end you haven't made a dent. They're so sure that a podcast has something to do with streaming, and that you can somehow make it not downloadable, or that the embedded song would somehow only be available for a limited timeframe before it magically went poof, that it's not even a conversation you can keep a straight face while having with them.

But with Collective Soul not having been on a major label since 2001, and with the indie label controlled by the band and not the other way around, it was Ed Roland's call all the way. And sure enough, the day before we released the issue with Collective Soul on the cover, their latest single was officially added to the podsafe network. They'd have been this week's cover story one way or the other. After all, I requested the interview because they make great music, nothing more. But when the opportunity presented itself, I took my shot at making a difference, and surprisingly enough, it actually happened.

From our end all is means is that we got to play the song at the end of the Ed Roland interview which we released as a podcast episode the same day the magazine issue was released (a nifty little bit of hindsight-obvious synergy I wish I'd picked up on from the get-go). Far more importantly, any podcaster in the whole wide world can now play the new Collective Soul song on their shows. And a number already have, including some rather influential ones. Plenty more will soon.

What does it all add up to? Time will tell. Hopefully two things happen: one, other famous bands will take a cue from Collective Soul and perhaps convince their labels to allow them to try it themselves, and two, the mere fact that a famous band has thrown its hat into the podsafe ring will hopefully help shine a brighter light on the wealth of talented-but-yet-unknown-outside-of-podcasting-circles musicians who've been making their music podsafe for years.

Time will tell. But it feels like after interviewing all these rock stars, lining up all these cover stories, and after receiving so many congratulations on accomplishing something that hasn't necessarily changed anything, this week I might have finally made a tangible difference in an industry I've only begun covering fairly recently. Hopefully it's not the last time.

This past weekend at PodCamp NYC someone asked me if I was using Flickr. My answer was "I used to."

Shortly after I was first initiated into new media back at PodCamp Boston 1.0, I began uploading every photo to Flickr from every event I attended. But then I hit that pesky 200 photo limit, where my older photos would become inaccessible as I uploaded newer ones, and I felt just a bit scammed by the fact that Flickr never made clear to me that this would happen when I signed up. Although the dollar amount they wanted for unlimited photo uploading was very low, and I've paid more money for premium accounts on other social networks when warranted, it just didn't feel right and I put it off for so long that eventually I forgot about Flickr completely.

These days I upload iProng Magazine's event photos to Facebook, cross-link to it from Twitter and my blog, mention it in the latest magazine issue, and call it a day. But the question I was asked at PodCamp did get me thinking that I may have erred too far on the side of the principle of the thing instead of settling for practicality. So when someone on Twitter asked me today if I was going to make the photos available on a non-Facebook platform, I decided to go ahead and give Flickr another try. I'd start uploading new event photos, and if they ended up adding something to the equation that Facebook didn't, then I'd happily pay their little monthly fee.

Then I tried to log into Flickr. What the heck did they do? I vaguely recall hearing that Flickr had been acquired by Yahoo, but such things usually mean little from an end-user standpoint, beyond the fact that they're now stable enough not to go out of business and maybe even won't have to charge for their most basic features. Yahoo does have a particularly disturbing track record of acquiring promising companies, doing nothing positive with them, and letting them wither before finally shutting them down and writing them off, but that's another story for another day. All I was going to do was log in and upload a few photos.

So I logged in an I was treated to a seemingly simple question, but one that I clearly managed to answer incorrectly: did I want to merge my Flickr account with my Yahoo account? Not really, but if that was the easiest way to get things done, to get past the login nonsense and get to the part where I got to upload photos, then sure, go for it. Nevermind that I haven't used my Yahoo ID for anything in about seven or eight years, because it's been that long since Yahoo has offered anything that I had any interest in using, but that's the way it goes. So I click the "merge" button without thinking too much about it, having no idea that in doing so I've probably ensured that I'll never end up using Flickr again.

What's the problem, you ask? It's been a year, so I don't remember my Flickr password. Simple enough, I click the "forgot password" option. Except instead of being asked to prove that I'm really the owner of my Flickr account, I'm instead being forced to try to prove that I'm the owner of my cobweb-laden Yahoo ID. Yeah, good luck on that. Beyond my email address they only want two things from me, my date of birth and my zip code, except I really have no idea what my zip code might have been when I created my Yahoo ID or what my zip code might have been the last time I used it (they don't specify which). I've tried every zip code I can remember having ever lived in, but no dice. So thanks for picking the worst possible account verification information you could possibly pick, because nothing is quite so temporary or easily since forgotten as the zip code you lived in back in 2001...or was it 1999?

So my Flickr account is, in effect, being held hostage by Yahoo because it's been years and years and years since I've done anything with any of Yahoo's lame services and it's been so long that I can't recall which zip code I was living in at the time.

There's apparently another option in which Yahoo seems willing to stop holding my Flickr account hostage if I do something involving a credit card. Really?

Sorry, but I give up. I'm sure I could write them, call them, pester them however necessary until they remove my account from whatever rat-hole it's currently trapped in, but I'm just not sure it's worth my time. This is the kind of bureaucratic nonsense I expect when I'm dealing with someone horrible like my bank or my cell phone company, not a photo sharing site.

I might go and create a whole new Flickr account just to get this latest batch of photos posted, but seeing as how something felt wrong about giving them a few bucks a month for an unlimited account to start with, today's experience all but ensures that the Flickr-Yahoo conglomerate won't be getting any of my money.

Sorry Flickr, your merger with Yahoo happened a long time ago. You've had forever to figure out how to keep your user accounts from getting tangled up with the ghost of an inactive Yahoo ID. As a solution, I've added the PodCamp NYC photos to the "iProng Magazine" page on Facebook, which is publicly accessible (you don't have to have a Facebook account). I think that solves the problem.

If you had told me that I would ever travel to New York City and spend three days in Manhattan but never take one step north of 14th Street, and two more days in Brooklyn of all places, and that I'd end up classifying it as one of my most successful and enjoyable NYC trips ever, I'd have said you were crazy.

But that's exactly what happened this past week with PodCamp NYC 2.0. After seven previous trips to NYC over the years I've seen enough of the midtown touristy stuff. So it was great to stay with friends who live in the Village and actually spend some quality time down there, something I've really never done in my previous trips. It's one thing to walk through Washington Square on your way to the next tourist destination. Getting a taste of the local culture and understanding what you're seeing is a whole other thing.

I've attended too many PodCamps to recall the exact number without counting them up on my fingertips, but this is the first time I've had the opportunity to attend a second PodCamp in the same city. A year ago at PodCamp NYC 1.0, I simply ventured from session to session, learning what I could and meeting who I could. But this year it was time to do something different, so we did an iProng Magazine table in the main hallway. And to make what we were doing more interesting, we had a different podsafe musician perform in front of our table every hour.

Actually sometimes it wasn't in front of the table, but behind it. Or beside it. Or in a few cases the performances included the piano that somehow managed to have been randomly parked next to our table. Nor was the location itself particularly stationary, as we ended up setting up the performance area at three different tables across two days, and at one point we were set up outside. It was a blast, and I can't remember the last time I heard so much great live music in such a short timespan. You throw it open like we did to where literally any podsafe musician can sign up to perform and you never quite know what you're going to end up with, but there wasn't a bad one in the bunch and we're going to have some fun doing interviews with them for the magazine in the near future.

As I was thumbing through the various PodCamp NYC 2.0 photos on Flickr this morning I saw the mountain of photos posted from the various sessions and I was reminded that there was a whole other side of PodCamp going on that I didn't get to participate in this time around because I spent nearly all my time at our table, but that's the way it goes. Last year I spent nearly all my time in sessions and regretted not having spent more time at the tables. No matter how much you might try to mix it up, you're never going to manage to be in all places at all times. But thankfully we have the social networks so we can fill each other in on what we missed. This time around I'm afraid you'll have to get that side of the PodCamp story from others.

What occurred to me on the way home (and boy was I ever not ready to leave town) was that our little setup with musicians performing was nothing short of a showcase. It wasn't for the record labels; there were no A&R people there with contracts at the ready. Instead the showcase was for podcasters. Each musician who performed was in effect auditioning in the hopes that the podcasters in attendance would go home and play their music on their shows. And I can't help but think that we just saw the musician showcase of the future in some sort of prototypical form.

The experimentation with the setup, the open endedness of the scheduling, it all allowed us to get a feel for what worked and what didn't, and I think we're onto something. I can easily see using this same model at any future PodCamp that wants it, and as I've said before, this was far from the first time that something like this has been done at a PodCamp. For the PodCamps that we can't make it to, perhaps someone else can handle the facilitation.

Above all, my primary take-away from PodCamp NYC 2.0 is a fairly straightforward one. Attendees kept coming up to our table asking the most basic of questions ranging from what podsafe music is, to what a podcast is. My initial temptation was to be annoyed by it, based on the premise that it's 2008 and PodCamp attendees ought to know these answers by now. But then it hit me: the people who were asking such basic questions were doing so because they were new to the fold, faces I hadn't seen before. They were asking the same annoying questions I was asking back in 2006 when I attended my first PodCamp. So the bottom line is that PodCamps are still bringing in new blood, new people who've just now become interested. In fact the majority of people I talked with this past weekend were folks I'd never seen at any previous PodCamp - it's not just the same batch of people showing up each time. And that has me really excited for what comes next.

From the "it sounded like a good idea at the time" category, I've got to be up at about four in the morning tomorrow to catch an early flight to New York City. Unable to sleep on a plane under almost any circumstances, the solution to a happy first day on the ground, then, is to already be used to getting up at 4am ahead of time so that when I do so tomorrow, it will have been on a full night's sleep. Which is why I just woke up.

I'm not unaccustomed to being awake at this time of day, it's just that when I am it's typically because I've been up working all night and am about to head to bed. My body has no problem with that, but isn't quite as pleased with the idea of 4am as a wake up time. It's been so long that I'd almost forgotten how that goes. My body shivers, my hands, shake to the point that I can barely grip the mouse, and when I check the temperature to see just how absurdly cold it really is, I find out it's not cold at all and my body is just doing its thing. Funny thing is, shivering to death when it's not actually cold never ever happens to me except when I get up this early, which is a big part of why I make a point of never getting up this early.

But here we are. And it's all good because in an hour or two my body will stop insisting that it's being attacked by an imaginary cold front, the headache will wear off, and I'll get in a nice productive day before turning in at the ripe and early time of about 8pm so I can try this again tomorrow. In between now and then I've got the April 23rd issue to get out the door (about 92% done at this point), some last-minute PodCamp planning to do, and a few more Manhattan meetings to get squared away on the schedule.

If you'd told me a year ago that the next time I was in the city these are the kind of people I'd be meeting with, I'd have laughed and told you to go stand outside in the imaginary cold front. But this is where the journey takes you.

So I'm heading out to New York City in about forty-eight hours and I realize that yeah, I'm gonna need another external hard drive before I go. When your main computer is a laptop, hard drive space will always be your biggest source of consternation. And in my case, as I find myself more and more frequently recording uncompressed audio interviews and needing to hang onto them for the long term, I'm needing progressively larger places to park such things. And with what we've got planned for PodCamp NYC, showing up with a nearly-full laptop just isn't going to work. One of these days I'll get my act together both by having a larger drive installed in my MacBook and by centralizing all my external data and backups to a Time Capsule, but that's not going to be the case within the next two days so last night it was off to the local Wal-Mart for one last cheapo external hard drive.

Funny thing about shopping late on a Sunday night is that you're typically one of only a handful of people in the store, which can be kind of creepy when you're in a big box like Wal-Mart. It's even weirder when you're shopping for something as sophisticated as a USB hard drive, as anyone else in the store at that time of evening is more than likely walking past you with a six pack of beer and a bag of cheetos as you try to weigh the varying features between the Maxtor and the Western Digital.

I thought I might have to deal with the drive I wanted being locked inside a glass case, which considering the time of night, would probably have been a sign to head home and try again during daylight. I mean, it's often hard enough to find someone who has a key to those cases when the store is bustling with people on a Tuesday afternoon, let alone when the place is so empty that time has stopped and the employees of the month have gone home and been replaced by the extras from the vampire chronicles.

Instead I found that the drive I wanted was fitted with an individualized anti-theft device which resembles a cross between a movie-style timebomb and one of those timers they give you at Chili's when you're waiting for your table. So I head to the register, buy my drive, and then smile as the cashier volunteers that she has no idea whether she is supposed to be the person to remove the timebomb - er, security device - from my shiny new hard drive. I can't blame her. It's probably the first time anyone in this town has ever bought an external hard drive after midnight.

She suggests I take the drive over to the huddled crew of three or four employees over by the door who might or might not be on duty, to which I hold up the drive and one of them points me on down the line to the only fully awake-looking employee in the store. She takes me back over to a console near the registers where she looks for the tool which defuses the timebomb or whatever the thing is that's strapped onto my hard drive as if it were dynamite. While she's working my eyes wander around the all-time-has-stopped storefront and since I'm standing just past the registers I can see them from the cashier point of view and I see that every register has a sign posted that reads "Customer cannot purchase tobacco unless they were born before 4/20/1990."

It strikes me that these signs are in fact only good for one day, and that management must be re-printing them and replacing them at every register on a daily basis.

Which amazes me because posting a sign that simply said "Customer cannot purchase tobacco unless they were born before today's date in 1990" would result in a sign that only had to be replaced once a year. But sadly I'm guessing they've already tried that and it didn't work. Doing so would seemingly only require that each cashier be accurately aware of the current date.

It's about this moment that the awake-looking employee manages to free my hard drive from the security device, and then it hits me: at no point did she attempt to confirm that I had actually purchased the hard drive. Didn't ask for my receipt, wasn't around when I was paying for it. I could have simply picked up a drive off the shelf, walked up to her at the front of the store, and asked her to unlock it. This is a trusting place, but it made me wonder if the store's employees fully understand the point of such a device in the first place. If they're going to remove the device without any kind of verification that I've actually paid for it, then there's little use in spending the resources to install such a device in the first place. And I suspect that if I'd given up on trying to find someone to remove the thing and had instead just walked out with it after paying, they'd have just waved me on when the door alarm was triggered. That is, if that all-too-flimsy-looking security device was real in the first place.

As I was walking out I thought back to the daily-replaced signs at the registers, and couldn't help but wonder if the entire store isn't structured under the false assumption that its employees are significantly more competent than can be expected for the wages they're paying. An anti-theft system is diluted by a cashier who doesn't know whether she's even the one who's supposed to deactivate it and a shift supervisor who doesn't attempt to confirm that I've paid for the device before deactivating it. A simple requirement that employees be aware of the current date necessitates that new signs be posted at each register every day informing them of that fact.

I'm missing something here. I can't quite put my finger on it. The machine that is corporate retail is working under the assumption that its lowest-level employees can't fend for themselves, and yet they still somehow miss the mark with how they go about trying to shield themselves against that face. It would seem that you can only dumb things down so much and at some point you've just got to trust the people you've hired, but I'm guessing they've already tried that and didn't like the results.

Got my hard drive, though. I've finally succumbed to the automation of Time Machine, and so far it's everything it's supposed to be, making me wonder why I didn't start using it in favor of manual backups months ago. And now that the stuff I don't need at my fingertips has been parked elsewhere, my crowded MacBook can breathe a little easier. That is until this weekend, when I go and fill it up again with the recordings of interviews with podcasters and podsafe musicians who visit the iProng table at PodCamp NYC.

A year and a half ago I received an email from a handful of folks attempting to pull off a grass roots podcasting event they were referring to as "PodCamp." I had doubts as to whether anyone could pull off putting together a conference in the short amount of time they'd given themselves, but something seemed right about it. So I signed on as a sponsor and asked them to put me in touch with someone who wanted to appear on iProng Radio and give us an interview about what they were planning, and I received a message that read "I'm Chris Brogan and will be available for your podcast."

After hearing what Chris had to say on our podcast, I got the sense that this PodCamp thing, whatever it was going to be, was something that shouldn't be missed. So I headed up to Boston with Shelly Brisbin, who was co-hosting iProng Radio at the time, and walked into what at the time felt like a foreign country. Strange phrases like "social media" and "podsafe" were being thrown around, unfamiliar tools such as LinkedIn and Second Life were being discussed, and while I didn't understand everything that went on that weekend, I went home knowing that it was something that I Ð and iProng Ð needed to be a part of.

Shortly thereafter, PodCamps started springing up all over the world. About six months later there was finally one, in Atlanta, that was sorta kinda near to me so I attended that one and ended up leading one of the sessions. Who me? I'm not even a speaker. But that's the whole idea behind PodCamp. Sessions are led not by professional speakers who travel the country giving sales pitches, but instead by folks from the community who have something to say, and just as often, people who have things they want answered.

I went home from PodCamp Atlanta thinking "I've almost got the hang of this," so when I found that there was another one in New York City a few weeks later, I used the fact that it had been too long since I'd been to Manhattan as an excuse to jet up there and take another swing at it. Finally, sometime that morning, it clicked for me. This really is a community of equals where everyone there assumes that everyone else there has something to add to the conversation, where the guy with the most popular podcast can sit there and chat with the guy who has an audience of twelve people and neither one feels out of place doing so.

I learned a few other things along the way as well, like how to get better sound quality from my podcast, and how to do a better job interviewing people (ironically, the latter is the session I was leading). But it's the community aspect that stuck with me the most firmly, and that held true through PodCamp SoCal last fall, which took place shortly after I'd moved to Los Angeles, so it was nice to finally have one in my backyard.

Now it's springtime again and that means it's time for PodCamp NYC 2.0 on April 25th and 26th. Actually there's a PodCamp in Washington, DC this weekend, and another in two weeks in San Antonio, and I'm not going to be able to make it either of those two, which is a shame because I know who's organizing them and so I know they're both going to be great events. PodCamp only has six official rules, and sometimes I think there should be a seventh: you're not allowed to feel guilty about the fact that you can't make it to them all.

But I'll be fortunate enough to make it to New York next week, and as it's been six months since my last PodCamp, I'm almost unduly excited. Friends I haven't seen in too long, things I haven't yet learned, more portions of the concept of community to grasp. And we're doing something new this year, as there will be an iProng table where we'll be having podsafe musicians perform live, sit down for an interview, promote their album if they've got one. Although it's new for us to be the ones facilitating it, it's old-hat for PodCamp, as co-founder Christopher S. Penn had musicians performing impromptu at his table at last year's PodCamp NYC, and I can recall a band called Uncle Seth setting up and performing in the main hall all the way back at the original PodCamp in Boston.

There will be plenty more going on at PodCamp NYC this year, far too many free sessions to even attempt to list here and the just fact that it's in Brooklyn this year is newsworthy. I look down the sponsor list and I see that the NYC Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting has signed on, as has Microsoft's Zune team. Sure, no one takes the Zune particularly seriously, but if they're looking to change that, showing up at PodCamp is a good start (note to Apple: where the $#!@ are you?). But no matter how big of names sign on for PodCamp, the key is that it's still an event where everyone who shows up is treated as equals and everyone goes home having learned something.

In any case, if you're within shouting distance of New York City, I want to see you there next week, particularly if we have yet to meet in person. For all of our remote communication abilities in this day and age, there are still times when you can meet face to face and accomplish more in five minutes than you could have remotely in five months. And if you're nowhere near NYC, check podcamp.org to find the nearest one. Or for that matter, just put together your own PodCamp locally the same way the founders put together the original one; after all this time, that's still the way it works.

So I hope to see many of you in person next week. It'll be easy to spot me, I'll be the one having way too much fun.