A Week Later. . .

. . .I have returned to Montreal and undertaken the long and complex process of reducing the huge piles of paper (and bits) awaiting me. But I write not to complain about impending fellowship deadlines. Rather, I write to extoll the virtues of the podcasting conference.

It was an unusual conference for me, since it combined media studies people with lawyers, podcasters and corporate people. The result? I actually learned a great deal. There’s no question that there were some fundamental disagreements among the presenters; for instance, the guy from audible.com argued that the most important thing for corporations was to do was to control content, whereas I argued that we should do everything we can to prevent that from happening. But it was great to hear how the corporate people planned to “monetize” podcasting, and how people had actually gotten their shows up and running. Though the conference swelled well past the size where you could do a proper hands-on session, I did get a really good sense of what people were actually doing with their own podcasts and how their studios were set up.

The conference itself should be available online sometime soon.

It also got me thinking: I’ve got this home studio that absolutely kills most podcasting studios. I could easily start doing something myself. And while this blog is all over the place, I even have a decent idea for the radio show: make it almost entirely consist of interviews with other academics. I mean, I go to all these conferences and meet interesting people and have interesting conversations, why not get people to talk about their work? I could throw in some other stuff here and there as I do it. Definitely not going to happen before I get that lo-boy CD done (I also have a new gear/software moratorium until that’s done), but maybe later in the fall or in the new year. I’m thinking about once a month. And of course, I’ll have to get some kind of RSS setup running before I do it.

In the short term, I’ll be recording a t-minute position paper I was going to give at AoIR this coming weekend, but since I’m now unable to go, I promised I’d send an mp3. Maybe I’ll post it here, too.

Oh, that should be the last time this blog refers to something called a podcast. From here on out, it’s just called a radio show.

Special bonus: after the conference, I went and guest-lectured in Tim Lenoir’s new media seminar. It’s always weird to teach my own work (though half the readers were from Kittler, which makes the whole thing weirder), but the lecture was actually a joy to give — I so rarely repeat lectures in graduate seminars, and yet for this one I was able to cut and paste parts of two older lectures and it seemed to work. Fresh to them, easy for me. It felt like cheating.

Other topics I hope to blog about sometime soon:
–why TV is better than movies
–various TV shows that have premiered
–everything else that’s going on

but one entry at a time.