This past weekend saw the spectacle of the New Media Expo in the sleepy desert community of Las Vegas, Nevada. Four years ago it was the Podcasting Expo and it was held in Ontario, CA, which really is sleepy. You’d think that the racier location would take some of the smell of geek off the event. Uh-uh. I was staying at the Hilton, which is “adjacent” to the Las Vegas convention center (quotes because it’s about a 15-minute walk though 100-degree heat; if you take the convenient walkway it’s 95-degree heat and for God’s sake when will they get an A/C guy out there?) but I can tell you the Hilton was a perfect storm of geek. Podcasters were all over the place. Furthermore, Sony Entertainment was having some kind of online gamers convention in another hall; and the Hilton is home to the Star Trek Experience, a pair of thrill rides which closes in September after a pretty decent ten year run. The podcasters, at least, didn’t tend to wear costumes.

As in previous years, I declined to attend any of the conferences, so I’m left with reporting on the scene on the convention floor. The exhibitors fell into catagories - hardware for you to produce your podcasts with (think Mackie boards and Shure microphones), software to mix your podcasts with (Sony, Ambrosia), companies which were an amalgm to the two (AudioMidi, which I learned is within walking distance of my day job); and a couple of actual podcasts. Orange County Podcasters was running some kind of continuous series of panel shows all day. Leo LaPorte of This Week In Tech also had a live video feed in which he interviewed various luminaries.

LaPorte was an interesting case by the way. There were monitors showing the video feed and the stream of viewer comments, and the 10 second latency caused by data buffering meant that you’d see something live, then you’d see it on the screen, then the comments would come. Usually they weren’t about the action anyway. There’s a girl on the staff called Colleen who has this rabid fan base.

For me the thing that made me decide to eat up vacation time for this was the Coverville 500 concert, held Friday night at Bally’s. Coverville is a music show that’s all cover versions, and the performers were people who are popular on the show, like Jonathan Coulton who has a beautiful soft-rock version of BABY GOT BACK, and Richard Cheese who does lounge-singer versions of alt-rock and hip-hop material.  Cheese has a once-a-month gig at the Hard Rock Resort.

The concert produced two remarks that I find telling about the whole podcast phenomenon. Jonathan Coulton was introducing a song about how difficult it is to be Tom Cruise, and he pointed out that is was interesting it was to be playing for an audience of famous people, “just not as famous as me. Your fame is to mine as mine is to Tom Cruise.” His point is well taken. To be a podcaster is to be an attention whore. It’s what we do. It’s what we are. And I have to tell you, every time I spotted Coulton in the Casino or at the Starbucks next to the Convention Center, I got that same little thrill you get when you see a more broadly famous person. If they’re famous to you, they’re famous. That’s how it works.

The other remark was made by Dan Klass, host of THE BITTEREST PILL and emcee for the concert. He made a point in his opening remarks to tell the crowd of cell-phone hoisting, twittering, live-blogging attendees this: “You cannot monetize this event. It’s a concert. You’re supposed to just enjoy it.” I’m pretty sure this advice was ignored by most.

-daniel k

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 5:33 am and is filed under Digital Wonderland, General, Internet, Music, Podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.