So I’ve got my second unconference under my belt, and I still have to pause for a few moments before I answer the question I get from friends, “So how was it?”

First things first, let me say that the organizers, particularly Amber Rhea, Rusty Tanton, and Penny Haynes pulled off an excellent event for the first PodCamp Atlanta. Close to 200 people spent two days in a fine facility at Emory University with loads of information, beaucoups nerd schwag, tasty food, and two busloads of AV gear set up everywhere to record damn near everything for posterity — not to mention the spiffy nametags on lanyards and envy-inspiring gear giveaways.

And let me also say that, for a significant portion of my time out in the professional world, I was what my more grease-knuckled, jeans-wearing co-workers referred to mockingly as a PowerPoint Engineer. Furthermore, I am now in academia, and when I get to teach, it is on advanced subjects to complete neophytes; when I learn, particularly at conferences, the download bandwidth into my brain is massive. You aren’t allowed to present at our conferences unless you’ve already got the answers, big, long, multi-slide answers. At all times, there is much PowerPoint, and much lecturing. This is my educational paradigm.

Thus it should be no surprise that it will probably take a while for me to warm up to unconferences. An unconference is more like a conversation than a lecture, and like the scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, sometimes, if the participants aren’t quite primed for the experience, then “waiter, this conversation isn’t very good.” But then, we’re all still kind of defining the boundaries of this whole field, and there are many questions that have yet to be properly formulated, let alone answered, so it would make sense that a lot of what went on was, quite necessarily, a lot of question-asking. If you came expecting a good bit of utilitarian training, you might be a little disappointed.

Another thing that can happen at any conference in a field in which new technologies — and business opportunities — are emerging is some shilling and grandstanding. I once sat through half an hour of probabilistic stress analysis and life prediction in Cleveland, OH, at a DoD/NASA conference that was nothing more than a big “Hey, buy our new analysis module for ANSYS, it does krazy maths OMG!” pitch for a product that was well beyond the budget of my lab. But at an unconference, anyone and everyone can grab the microphone — indeed, they are expected to, as the model of a “presenter” spending much of the time lecturing to the audience is sorely frowned upon — so when you’ve got a giant lecture hall in which a quarter of the people are there in part to make new business contacts and land new contracts in a field that I swear they are making up as they go along, the conversation is just that much more likely to get derailed by the dollar. Some people just can’t wait to monetize everything, and sometimes I want to flagellate them with my earbuds.

The most content-rich session for me, I think — in part because it was so regular-conferencey and PowerPoint-heavy and taught by a real actual lawyer — was Legal Issues in Podcasting, although that focused primarily on the intellectual property aspect of things. I myself am more interested in the please-keep-my-ass-out-of-jail aspect of things, considering that there’s still not much legal hope for bloggers and the like, even though they often uncover news that The News doesn’t see, and one vlogger still sits in jail because the feds trumped up a state case against him so they could show the same kind of contempt for new media as old. Still, the IP angle is important for those of us who like to play music and sample other media content for quotes, because day after day the Big Media Companies demonstrate they are incapable of wrapping their minds around the new model of media delivery and continue to want us to pay them for publicizing their overpriced product, even though the vast majority of us aren’t making a dime off this stuff.

There was some better exploration of my topic of interest at the following session, Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Podcasting and Traditional Media. I did have to embrace the unconference credo that “this is your conference” to grab the mic and get what I wanted, though, because the “serial entrepreneurs” in the room (lord I hate that term, but yes, some people actually apply that to themselves) managed to drive the discussion right down the same old “my clients want to know how I can shill their product on your cute little new bloggy stuff” track for ten or fifteen precious minutes, when I could’ve sworn we were there to talk about the news. There was some good back-and-forth about the trade-offs between trying to adopt certain aspects of traditional media (such as standards, a code of conduct, editing skills etc.) while not just becoming the next version of stodgy, un-adaptive Old Media. I think many podcasters could contribute valuable content to traditional media venues like NPR, and I’m willing to abide by certain rules to do the work that they just might not have the time to do; if there’s a guild I have to join or a certain code of ethics I need to sign, just let me know, because there are a lot of amateurs out there covering valuable stories that might otherwise get missed. And if signing up for your guild means you’ll send a union rep and a lawyer when I uncover a scoop that pisses off the government, I’ll be even happier to join! Stephen Eley pointed out a number of podcasters are trying to establish a serious Podcasting Guild for just that purpose. (See also the Media Bloggers Association.) On the other hand, Prof. Len Witt argued, if podcasters go out and form a guild or establish some other way to say, “Okay, here’s what you have to do to be considered a journalist,” we’re just creating another hurdle for a different set of people who will then not be considered journalists, and will be dissuaded from contributing. He pointed us to an ambitious new project called Assignment Zero, which seems like it aims to give new media contributers a serious platform for distribution with the benefit of a little editorial guidance. That kind of model might make some traditional media quit freaking out about the editorial challenges of citizen journalism. (See Prof. Witt’s own platform at the Public Journalism Network.)

After I went home for lunch to walk my increasingly neurotic and apartment-destroying dog, I got to Meet the Vloggers for a bit and find out why a handful of vloggers did what the did, and what cameras, software, and distribution platforms they used. Probably a more useful session for complete beginners, but that was fine, because I was still writing up the talking points for my 2:30 session on Podcasting and Politics. I eschewed my preferred PowerPoint format largely because I had discovered my new microphones were very sensitive to fan noise from things like projectors, and, you know, this was an unconference. After forty minutes of basically prompting and directing a group discussion on who political groups are trying to reach, why they might do so through podcasting, and what kind of content they ought to be using for each audience and purpose, I felt pretty lousy. Like I said, I’m used to getting up and lecturing; this being my first time leading a session at an uncon, I might have swung too far to the other extreme in an attempt to overcompensate, so I felt like I basically wasted everybody’s time because there weren’t really any answers to be given. A couple people bothered to come up to me later and say they enjoyed the discussion, though, so perhaps the questions were interesting enough. Me, I still feel flat. But again, this is a new enough field that perhaps the new questions are more important than pre-packaged answers. What the hell do I know?

A couple other sessions that I attended seemed to be pretty straightforward sales pitches, with very general descriptions on the schedule being smokescreens for very specific software platforms developed by the presenter, and I heard the same about a session or two I didn’t attend myself. This was quite easy for any of us to figure out ahead of time by paying attention to the PodCamp website, though; just look at who’s presenting the session, then follow their link on the registrants page, and if you see that they’re associated with a company that does exactly what the session description says, chances are that’s what you’re going to hear about. And anyway, since there are so many niches to fill when it comes to enhancing content and engaging the social network around your show, it’s probably good for us to get a first-hand introduction to useful new tools, even if it’s not perfectly “fair and balanced.” I managed to pimp my still-favorite new gizmo, Cellblock, a few times, because I think it might represent one decent way for podcasters to solve the AFK Problem — the fact that it’s precisely the portability of podcast content that makes it all that much less likely our audience will provide feedback and engage in discussion. I think if we’re going to encourage a two-way discussion between podcaster and listener (and to a growing extent, viewer, as more people upgrade their iPods), it’s going to rely heavily on cellphone-based input, because they’re not going to remember to respond by the time they’re back at their computer.

There was more, plenty more, and the fact that I’ve blathered on this long about it is a clear indication that there was quite a bit to take away from the first annual PodCamp Atlanta, even if my first response to the opening question was “I’m not really sure.” I’m not really sure how much I took away from my second unconference because I’m still not used to unconferences — and because we’re still hammering out the landscape in this field as we go. But it’s obviously provoked a buttload of discussion in its aftermath (this is just the tip of the iceberg in my head), so it must have done the job just fine. It’s good that there are more questions than answers: that means we have good reason to do this again next year!

And then maybe some other Young Democrats will actually come to that one.

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