Social Connection Across the Virtual/Physical Border

What an exciting year this is turning out to be. My official work has begun to pick up, and I'm pushing personal project internally. In the social media/startup/podcasting/tech sphere I've started to meet up with people in person. Very exciting and interesting to watch.

Online social media is an interesting phenomenon. In a sense it is like the old forums/read news and text based chats in that there is enough distance that a person who is perhaps a bit more shy can feel comfortable speaking in the virtual environment. The interesting twist is that with the addition of video and virtual worlds you begin to feel that you are interacting "for real". While this is true to some extent, real friendships and relationships are created, it has been somewhat startling when you transfer that to the physical realm.

I suppose it is a bit more startling for me. I spent about a year homebound with very little personal interaction beyond the online medium. For that time who I was in groups in online reality (whether virtual worlds or twitter or chats on blogtv etc.) was how I interacted.

The real shock came when I could finally walk well enough to go to a meet up where I knew no one and I found myself feeling uncertain and shy. (This was complicated by the fact that I wasn't sure how to introduce myself, my resume has one name, my public presence has another.) I was shocked at the way I reacted.

Then I thought of how I had acted before my convalescence. Sure I'd join in discussions in groups where I knew people but when it wasn't strictly work based I was on the shy side. Walking up to someone I didn't know and introducing myself was not really something I did.

Here I was expecting myself to act as my outgoing online self, but that hadn't been my modus operandi in the physical world. The contrast is probably why I skipped the meet up for the following couple of months. But I also reflected on my reactions (and got some combo/business cards that make introducing myself much easier.)

Today I went to the Boulder Open Coffee at The Cup. It was a great meet up. I also decided that I was going to embrace my online style and make it my in person style. It was a bit scary at times. I could tell I'm still getting the hang of it but it was promising. And I'm hoping to make it to the New Technology meet up this evening, this time with more confidence.

What I have found is that although the online networks are incredibly powerful (and can cause a person to grow) it is important to go try it out in the physical face to face world. The interaction is different. The combination of the two realms is awesome.

Voices and Volumes - What do You Know About?

Continuing on the local thread, I just accidentally found out about a Denver area Podcaster meetup. It's been around for years. I've searched on "denver podcast" and "boulder podcast" many times before and have not found this site before. I've even poked around on the Meetups page and reviewed more than a few weeks of the upcoming events and not seen anything on this. Only now when I've wandered over to a local seesmicer's blog, have I found out about this event.

Meanwhile, I know about Jeff Pulver's social media breakfast in Boston today. I also have heard other tweetups and social media gatherings in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and parts of the UK. All of this makes me ask why?

The only answer that comes to me is that some places have better spokespeople than other places.

Chris Brogan and Jeff Pulver are big connectors, verbal, regular posters on blogs, twitter and video venues - so we all hear about whats going on in Boston, New York & Israel.

San Francisco has its share of big names - Robert Scoble, Loic Lemeur and many others.

The UK has Loudmouthman (Nik Butler) and Phil Campbell and again, many others.

These people are verbal, visible in a global sense, and actively doing stuff. Even if I missed a tweet or two their blogs and videos and various media expressions - and the echoes on other blogs - all make sure I hear about the events that they are part of. In a sense this is the regional elitism that Eric Rice was talking about a while ago. (Yeah, which I said was really the fault of the local folks.)

So the question is, how do we address this? I imagine for people who are plugged into the local networks there is no perceived problem as they know what is going on. But what about the newly transplanted or the newly interested? How do we hook in and and how do we find out about these things. And judging by the varied attendance of some events it seems even the plugged in would benefit from more visibility.

So who do you think of as a voice from the Boulder/Denver area? Am I just not following them? How to do small local areas improve the "volume" of their local news and events so that people find them as easily as I find the "big center" events? Or even so that when I search for such events in Google they come up somewhere towards the top?

PodcampXL - First Form

PodcampXL - Podcamp with the Local Focus

So here are my first ideas on how I envision PodcampXL Boulder.

Attendees:
First of all this is a local event for the Boulder/Denver Area. If you consider Boulder/Denver to be local then this is for you.

So who is this event for. This is ostensibly for/about podcasting but podcasters in a rather broad definition. If you have done audio or video on the internet that you have made public, whether an official podcast or a viddler video or a seesmic video or an utterz, (etc) then this is about you.

Also if you are interested in watching, listening to, or influencing video and audio casting this is also for you. You don't have to be making the content to have a stake in the content.

The event itself:
First off, this is a participatory event. Everyone is expected to contribute whether presenting speaking, or contributing opinions. If you aren't comfortable getting up in front of a crowd to talk there still are ways you can contribute to the content.

There are two parts to the camp.
The first part is creating and evaluating content.
During the course of the podcamp people will create 'casts in whatever format they prefer to present what they do - what their content is.

This would be started off or done concurrently with some workshopping on how to make 'casts. Different workshops would be held on various aspects of casting - the tools, the process, etc.

At the end of the camp there will be a showing of these casts. Depending on how many people are participating and how much content is produced we may need to find groupings of the casts and have simultaneous showings.
Also I would like to have several audio listening areas so that the audiocasts can have fair listening.

Watching is fun - but the point is to get feedback, and this is where everyone can contribute. These showings will be evaluated. The details on how they will be evaluated and what kind of evaluation will be done needs to be fleshed out.
Some possible ideas:

• Where would you enjoy watching/seeing this
• How would you categorize this
• How would you promote this? (Would you promote this?)
• What would you want to see more of/less of?

These are just ideas off the top of my head, but the purposes of the evaluations include giving casters things to think about to improve their work and thinking about what the next steps for casting are.

And that brings me to the second part of the camp. 'Casting has been going on long enough that it is time to ask where are we going next. There are plenty of blog posts on "getting out of the fishbowl", "How do we monetize", "How do we get distribution" and other areas. Its time to talk about these questions and think about next steps and how we reach those next steps. This is where ideally we will have not only podcasters but people who distribute media and promote media - both old and new - as well as business people and others who want to join the conversation.

So in addition to making content and evaluating it, we will be thinking about what 'casting means and where it is going.

What sessions go here? Well that's also to be fleshed out. Some ideas:

• Monetizing podcasts - how to? should you? what is the impact on monetizing?
• Out of the fishbowl - How do we get visibility beyond the already interested parties, like to those who's view of new media is "Oh yeah my husband forwards me YouTube videos" (Real quote from someone who is a film critic and has written a book on such.)
• How audio content is different between mediums?
  
• Social implications - Are we in an age of meritocracy? How do we preserve such a democratization of media - or is this destined to fade away like other moments of meritocracy? What differences does the easy 'casting present to how we learn information and share information?
• Etc.

And then of course from these discussions and evaluations I would like to see the discussion continue, whether in living rooms, meetups, or in other ways.

But for all of this we need to come together and create this event and share in this event.

Get involved!
So if you are in the Boulder/Denver Area and are interested in a Local, Participatory, Discussive event let me know. If you want to help create it - really make sure you let me know.

Feel free to leave me a comment below or send me an email: I'm goldiekatsu at gmail

Thoughts on Location and Local

I mentioned PodcampXL and an interest in doing one locally back in July which is when Eric Rice first mentioned it. Its nice that I was interested, but until now not much had happened with that.

Recently I took a road trip, which was prompted in part by a need to reflect on where I am and where I am going. Of the many topics of thought one was about location and community. Between twitter and Second Life, and the chatrooms of BlogTV, Ustream and Operator 11, and the recent advent of Seesmic a lot of what I think of as my community and my friends with like interests are found all over the globe. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. We are living in an increasingly global society, that is one of the effects of fast ubiquitous communication. However, when it comes at the expense of the local community that is a problem.

Sure I do have friends locally and a community that I live within, but the majority of the local community has no idea what I'm talking about when I talk about global friends, video on the net, cool new technologies, and the desire to think deeply of the consequences and future of these technologies. For that discussion I go to the net.

The network will always have a broader pool of people with similar interests. Yet at the same time the ease of finding such people with such interests over the network sometimes causes a person to overlook the local. Case in point, I was visiting Seesmic in San Francisco and Loic pointed out that there were a lot of seesmicers in Colorado. I had noticed that, but the truth is that I have not yet met any of them. In a sense it is kind of silly. People with similar interests are living (figuratively) in my own back yard and yet we wave from the distance over video.

So...that brings me back to PodcampXL. I know, it sounds like a super big podcamp (extra large) but as Eric Rice describes it the focus is local, extra local perhaps? Community comes together from doing things together. Sure gatherings are nice but what seems like the next step for me is to start working on this PodcampXL. It is inspired by podcamp but the focus is participation and presentation - of one sort or another - by all. I'd like to see this PodcampXL be the start of something rather than just a great event. Afterwards I'd like to keep the discussions going the working together going. How that works isn't clear to me, but it shouldn't be - it should come organically from the process of the PodcampXL.

Rather than describe the ideas of how I envision PodcampXL and make everyone scroll through my thoughts I will write more on my PodcampXL idea in the next post.