What a day. A few short months of planning, conference calls, meetings, trips to venues, calls to sponsors, emails, texts, jaikus, tweets and everything else that goes into making an event happen, all finally came together today (technically yesterday in the form of PodCamp Ireland.
Late to bed on Friday night following another gig meant an early start Saturday morning joining Bernie and Neville Hobson for a great breakfast and chat in Zuni before trekking around the corner to set up for the day. Not to recap every little event and movement from start to finish but there are a few things I got to take out of PodCamp.
Spending most of my day in the main room looking after a few audio bits, keeping an eye on the streaming and backchannel meant I never got to make the trip to the Hibernian (down the street) but I finally got to catch up with James, Michele, Krishna, Conn, Brian and a host of other people I’ve only previously conversed with via blogs / emails / skype etc. As much as I enjoyed finally getting to put faces to names and make proper introductions, it was great to “bend the ear” of some of the faces and names I didn’t know on the day.
I did manage to take in Brian and Dean’s opening talk on creativity, the first morning panel session, podcasting for arts organisations, podcast artwork (Jennifer Farley), the second panel discussion (looking at building communities) while tripping amongst conversations with Michele Neylon (nice to finally meet), Elly Parker (nice moo cards and tip off about blurb.com), Grannymar (who got TRIPLE-DECKER sandwiches for lunch), Margaret Durand (FEIW, great chat about all things Deise and the music scene in the South East), Dean Whitbread (working in the mid 90s and broadcasting gigs), Cathy Fitzgerald (ArtLinks, all things community), Will Knott (custom laptop covers to medieval-esque archery over oak trees) and beyond.
A closing address from Conn saw some of the collective head for food and drinks afterwards in Kilkenny, myself retiring home after clearing out the Ormonde and loading up a van full of audio gear. Leaving a gig earlier tonight (close to 1am) I happened to bump into Brian, Dean and Martin again, picking up GD’s business card and getting some further ideas going in talking with Brian in brief about getting this country of ours podsafe.
I think that’s one of the great successes of today – so many ideas for so many people. Podcasting, blogging, social media has been somewhat demystified; techies met non-technies, podcasters met artists, bloggers met musicians and writes, journalists, photographers – a real fantastic audience.
All the action on the day can be relived through a quite active Jaiku channel or the uStream.tv channel (sessions only from main room available for viewing). Rumour too has it that we’re earmarking September 27th 2008 for the next PodCamp Ireland on an even grander scale.
I’m looking forward to it already.
Thanks a million to everyone who was there today both physically and virtually, to those of you who dropped in during the day and disappeared and to Bernie, Conn, Krishna and Brian who I’ve been working with over the past few months to get all of this up off the ground. Here’s to the next one…
Photos via flickr to come tomorrow, for now – sleep.
