Podcon 2007: more interesting on the sidelines

The Podcon 2007 Podcast Conference was held yesterday at the Sofrino Recreation Complex near Moscow.

The occasion for the conference was the second birthday of the portal Russian Podcasting . Around one of the so far few sites of a similar theme, created two years ago, has already developed a community of podcasters who are happy to meet and exchange experiences.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to stop what is usually present at events called conferences: “Podcon 2007” was mainly devoted to acquaintance and accompanying actions, rather than something “educational”. Which, in principle, is understandable: at the moment the Russians did not have time to accumulate such rich experience as their foreign counterparts. As the creators of Show Tits Pussy, Vakhtang Makharadze and Pavel Kartaev, explained, serious lectures on the art of podcasting were given at the last Podcon, while familiarity and informal communication were expected from the second conference.
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The “official part”, which began at three in the afternoon on Saturday, was reduced to setting up the equipment and the performance of “top podcasters”, among which, first of all, Vasily Strelnikov experienced in this business. Vasily graciously agreed to answer questions from the audience - and courageously answered intimate ones: he mostly answered briefly or laughed off serious questions from those who didn’t associate themselves with podcasters.

In particular, it turned out that Russian Podcasting does not yet have a business model: for Vasily, the site is still a hobby. He characterized it as “a community without debility voting systems,” and it is not planned to sell it yet: “There have been no offers from Habr yet.”

Russian Podcasting has examples of successful cooperation with commercial organizations: in particular, one of the most popular podcasts Show Tits is sponsored by a condom manufacturer (by the way, this company also became the main sponsor of Podcon 2007). Other examples include work with manufacturers of mp3-players and equipment for creating podcasts.



As is often the case, the most fascinating part of the event was waiting for participants on the “sidelines”: “rallies” were held all over the territory of “Sofrino”, where experienced podcasters shared their experience with budding colleagues. The focus in this regard were Vakhtang Makharadze and Pavel Kartaev, who, despite their ambiguous popularity, are experienced radio presenters and highly professional podcast creators. Gregory Bakunov, who had to answer questions about Yandex and high technologies in general during the conference, did not lag behind them either .





Today was devoted to the rest of the "official part" and "lobby": to meet someone from the podcasters on the territory of the recreation complex was quite difficult. According to the plan, at the moment all participants should have already returned to Moscow.