Deborah

Wow – lots to digest in this post – but as a new person to podcasting, I want you to know that I appreciated your presentation style. There are lots of “what ifs” with technology and if the purpose, in less than an hour, was to explain the basic infrastructure – you met my needs. In fact I’m here on your blog looking for the slides and ran across this conversation.

I also attended the tool session led by Owen and walked away feeling that I was not the target audience member for that session. Although, I took notes and learned – in BOTH sessions, as a newbie, I understood what you were saying without effort.

Not to be Pollyanna, but I’m frankly grateful to all the presenters who gave of their time and knowledge to help those of us in the audience.

Thanks!

Deborah
webwriter

Podcamp Ohio was my first podcamp, and I thought that the presenters (at least the ones I went to) did a good job of keeping the sessions on-topic but soliciting feedback from the attendees.

If Habari was expecting ringing endorsements of their product across the board at a Podcamp, they don’t understand the concept of an UnConference, and maybe they should sponsor Expos or true Conventions from now on (I hear there’s one at Ohio State in February). Maybe they should have sat in on Todd Cochran’s session to see how to do a session without turning it into an ad for your service (I think he mentioned Blubrry once or twice, and those were in passing).

“Bandwidth” is the width of the bridge. It’s the rate of possible flow. It’s the difference between 20 users at 56kbps and 20 users at 1mbps. One eats through available transfer faster — this is the word you wanted, “transfer”. Bandwidth absolutely can scale. Some hosts offer fixed bandwidth, while others burst when more visitors connect. Unlimited transfer is absolutely not the same as unlimited bandwidth.

I was not insulted that you didn’t mention Habari. The reason Habari sponsored the event was to become more well known, which unfortunately, sponsoring the podcamp did not do well as well for us as we had hoped. Unless you count this post, which I think doesn’t reflect well on anyone.

Nonetheless, if you’re presenting podcasting to a novice audience, omitting the many great newbie-friendly free and commercial hosted services is a big oversight. That was what I was trying to add during your session at Podcamp, and in my opinion the tone of your response was dismissive, which was even worse than the omission.

In any case, you needed only to look at the sponsor list to see these alternatives, which was the point I was trying to make in my post.

Ideally, you might also link to the list of WordPress contributors if you’re into discovering motives. My name’s on that list, too: http://wordpress.org/about/

“The event must be new-media focused – blogging, podcasting, social networking, video on the net.” Yes. The tools that allow you to publish and create that content very much apply. It was actually the intent of my session to discuss these tools. Rather than focus on tools everyone knew, we did talk a bit about rarer tools like Aptana, which participants seemed interested in. I would have loved to talk about recording software. I also had a list of graphics packages, blog packages, server software, blog services, compression packages… There just wasn’t time with all of the talk about HostGator.

I think it’s clear if you read my post that my disappointment with the treatment of the sponsors by the event staff is the primary reason I would not recommend sponsoring the event. Even some of the event staff has conceded that. While I think the format of the sessions was disappointing in general (consider the differences between your presentational style and my round-table style), that wasn’t the reason to withdraw sponsorship, as you seem to have read.

I hope that clears up any misconceptions you may have had about what I wrote, and maybe leads to improvement on all fronts next year. Thanks for the linkage.