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Rather than describing last night’s event right now, I’m just going to jump right in. Let’s just say that bragging about timing yesterday was an open invitation for karma to slap me in the neck. Last night I set all 4 of my alarms to get up early for the morning sessions, but…..

The power went out. Wonderful. I woke up at 9:30 am.

So I completely missed the early sessions and just got in.

Now I’m at my first session: What are advertisers looking for?

This is truly a Q&A format rather than a presentation. Since I am not a podcaster whatsoever, I’m not sure this is the right session for me, but I certainly am interested in advertising. Time for a mini-tangent:

Here’s why I don’t listen to- or pay much attention to- podcasts:
1. Not searchable- When I’m looking for content, I can easily and visually search blogs. Finding great video content is a little bit tougher. But finding good audio content is nearly impossible for me.
2. Not “bend-over-the-page-able”- I drive a lot. I decided to try out an audiobook for the long ride each day. I quickly learned that audiobooks are not for me. With a book, I can easily return to my last attention spot. But when I listened to the audiobook, I kept drifting off and couldn’t easily find the place where I started to drift.
3. Not discoverable- It is very difficult to discover new audio content, as you have to actually listen to the content in order to gague the relevance. With a blog, it’s incredibly easy to traverse the web finding new posts by following links. If you hit a wall, you can easily recognize that the link you’ve just clicked is not for you. It’s a two second process involving nothing but a scan. Podcasts require a much more significant time expenditure.

Now, don’t get me wrong….that’s not to say I’m down on podcasts or that I don’t think they are viable. Not at all. If I felt that, I wouldn’t be at podcamp. I’m just saying that I have not paid much attention to podcasts so far, and those are my reasons.

Coming from an outside perspective, I’m interested to see how advertising success can be tracked from a podcasting sponsorship.

Okay, session is over. Time to eat. Next up: a session entitled “Tools of the Social Media Trade”, which will be much more interesting to me since it covers something I actually know about. Liveblogging a session on advertising and podcasting is equivalent to covering a symposium on playing dungeons and dragons: completely outside my universe of experience, so the best I can do is list the things I don’t understand.

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