Live Blogging From Mountain View at Podtech Breakfast

I’m sitting at PodTech’s breakfast event, it’s a focus on corporate podcasting with John Furrier, and Robert Scoble. Ran into Dave McClure, and met a lot of other interesting folks.

I’m using Google Wireless network for the first time, it asked for some authentication and pushed me to my Google/IG page. Although I’m indoors, I’m clocking about 11mbps. Here’s a few observations, pictures will go up later

• John and I had a conversation about Zune, interesting.
• I talked to Dave McClure about the blog ad model on techmeme, he’s been publishing on the oDesk blog.
• Podtech was started a year ago by John Furrier, he’d publish his interviews on his blog.
• Within a few weeks thousands of downloads were happening of his audio interviews
• Has over 30 employees
• Is ventured funded to build a media company to publish the voices and to document the valley.
• Discussions about the importance of word of mouth marketing and how social media is a big impact
• Dell support and Jeff Jarvis example, Dell didn’t look.
• Techcrunch in the early days added images, and it helped Mike to stand out of the crowd
• Podtech’s videos on the recent Acrobat (there are some wordpress errors FYI) announcement received more traffic than podcasts as videos really stand out.
• Google works by lots of linking patterns, Microsoft research showed that most folks in google results never click the ‘next’ page.
• Discussions about Second life, used for marketing purposes and even a town in east coast that re-created their city to simulate disaster planning.
• RSS is an bottom up driven technology that empowers users.
• Video can be used to demonstrate things that text is not able to convey.
• Questions:
• Q) Is videoblogging or podcasting going to get adoption levels like blogging? Each medium has it’s strengths and weaknesses
• Q) Chapters needed in video and podcast shows , A) It makes the page more complex, but there’s a wiki coming as well.
• Q) What’s the audience and traffic like A) Different audiences, John says: “Bloggers email and podcasers call”. iTunes audience is part of the PodTech listenership. It’s less techy. Most of the audience is Techie elite and early adopters. Create informational ‘info talk’. They didn’t go for the mass audience. 5 million downloads since then, and now they’ve added some metrics to find real listeners and its about half a million downloads a month. Audience is a tough subject, so they are looking for downloads. Many discussions around metrics will occur over the coming time (Jeremiah: Just because someone downloads a podcast to an iPod doesn’t mean they listen to, or if they do, how MANY times they listen to it). There are many ways to track analytics, perhaps looking for feedback. A new audience is emerging is called “tech aware”, which is more mainstream audience.
• John’s Predictions
• Niche Programing, a cross between browser, mobile, tv. Seagate is going to take advantage of this.
• Q: How is PR not scared sh*tless about blogging and pocasting A) they are, but now they have to content with it.
• Q: Audience: digitally savvy, C level, early adopters, Dual degree, and plus all of Scoble’s audience (which is about 30k subscribed a day plus visits)

Hosted at Fenwick and West

John Furrier Prepared

Greeted by Maryam Scoble

We gathered Podtech Briefing

And talked with the Xilinx Crew

“Do you have a Blog? No, I have a Blog 2.0!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 9:14 am and is filed under Conference, Events, Podcasts, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.