Last Friday found me on the road at 4:30am for an early morning arrival in Halifax to attend the Atlantic Podcast Summit.

I came away with a number of salient points and particularly enjoyed the talks given by Kristen Meinzer and Dila Velazquez, who is content and audience developer at Curiouscast. Primarily I came away with some renewed enthusiasm for the medium, so many at the conference treat podcasting not as platform for ad dollars, but something to be enjoyed and shared. Much like the web used to be.

The location inside the Cineplex on Spring Garden road was interesting. It certainly had comfortable seats, but the audio was poor and the interaction difficult. They could stand to learn from Peter’s Crafting {:} a Life – much of the value obtained from conferences would seem to be from the interaction with those attending, comfortable seats are of a secondary concern.

Lunch was not provided so since there was little opportunity beforehand to meet interesting strangers, people in their pre-formed cliques went about there own way. It’s a pity, as a catered lunch is a great opportunity to force people to bump into each other. Those collisions provide for all kinds of opportunity for learning. Lunch was cheap, cheaper than what can be found near my haunts in Charlottetown.

It was a short trip as I managed to somehow guide the car into our lot in Stratford sometime after 8pm. I was kept awake with bad coffee and the miracle of actually listening to a 3hr podcast with a conversation centred around hunting bear with bow and arrow.