Podcasters Across Borders Day 2 just wrapped up and I am back in my hotel room blogging about today and yesterday (see immediately below). I haven’t had a chance to absorb everything so I will write off the cuff. Forgive me.

Podcasters Across Borders, or PAB2007 as it’s tagged, is a podcasting conference for Canadian and American podcasters. Actually, any country in the world. It is superbly organized by the funny duo of the Canadian Podcast Buffet, Mark Blevis and Bob Goytech. This is it’s 2nd year and I heard so much positive reviews of last year’s I thought I’d give this a try. I enjoyed PodCamp Toronto tremendously and I am happy to report that so far, PAB2007 is enjoyable and most importantly, of course, I’ve learned a lot. Plus, all of us attendees donated more than 80 children’s books to a local school.

While today was the meat of the conference with seminars throughout the day, yesterday was like an introduction and meet and greet– on a cruise on the St. Lawrence iver (directly behind my hotel room). Very nice. ‘Twas fun meeting a lot of new people with such a wide variety of podcasts. The sights were terrific– and of course, by the time I decided to start taking photos, I disocvered that my batteries went kaboink. Andmy spares were back in the hotel room. Fortunately, Dwight from the Much Ado About Nothing Podcast was very kind to lend me some and I was able to take two photos before the sun went down (see above and directly below).

I also got to meet Daryl Cognito of Atomic Suburbia who is also a big fan of newspaper comic strips, Melinda Mason of the My Marilyn podcast, Charles Cadenhead of Mostly News and so many others (my apologies that I didn’t mention your name. This blog post is getting long!).

Of course, the stars were there, Mitch Joel, Julien Smith, Hugh McGuire, Tod Maffin and a last-minute addition, Christopher Penn. Unfortunately, I couldn’t draw with Chris Brogan as he couldn’t make it.

What did I learn so far?

A lot of people think my idea for a podcast is a great one (still not announcing it here yet) and although I had planned to do some recording at PAB2007, and although I kept reminding myself NOT to forget to bring my minidisic recorder, I did, however, forget to bring MY MICROPHONE! AARRRG!!! A lot of people liked my idea for my podcast– what encouragement!

Social networks don’t care about technology.

48% of leisure time is spent online.

Podcasts with background noise are more engaging.

People will create their own online communities to support your product. If my Spud comics ever hit the big time, I will need to keep this in mind.

Creative Commons Licensing in Canada. Mark Blevis approached the Law & Technology people at the University of Ottawa to write up a Canadian podcasting guide on fair dealing (or fair use as they say in the US). creativecommons.ca

How podcasting is going to save the world. How can my skills as a podcaster help solve problems? This is exactly what I was pondering the past few weeks (also to blogging and the rest of my online concoctions). Hugh McGuire did a fantastic presentation about this.

The Arc of the Whale Model in storytelling. Sonya Buyting of Sassy Science put on a very informattive presentation that will be very useful to not only my comics, but Twitter Spud as well. Well, to anything really. Podcasts, radio documentaries, etc. It’s basic storytelling 101 that I was never, ever taught in school.

The view from my hotel window (6am)

[tags]PAB2007[/tags]