Last weekend I attended the Niagara on the Lake Meetup for podcasters and social media enthusiasts. It was a wonderful event attended by about 30 people and held at the beautiful Prince of Wales hotel in Niagara on the Lake. Congratulations to the organizers Keith Burtis, John Meadows, and Bill Deys for organizing a fantastic event. Some of my personal highlights included the lovely personalized tweetup badges provided by Jim Milles and Kristina Lively, Bill Deys’ presentation on posting video “all” the hosting sites on the web, and seeing many friends from previous meetups and podcamps. I have received some excellent feedback from my presentation at NOTL2008 including blog posts about the event which mentioned my talk by Mark Blevis and Wayne MacPhail.

I neglected to record my talk but John Meadows remembered and he has posted audio to the talk on the NOTL site.

You can

I did not prepare slides for my talk, because I wanted to focus on facilitating a conversation with the other attendees rather than just present a monologue of my own thoughts.

I worked from a set of prepared notes with a few audio clips thrown in for illustration. My notes are below.

Examining Your Personal Purposes and Potential For Podcasting

Sean McGaughey NOTL Meetup

1. I subconsciously ripped off the theme and of this talk from John Meadows. On the Line Episode 13: http://meadowsonline.com/?q=node/15

2. He talks about how so much of our computing world is defined by metaphor

3. Email– Carbon Copies

4. Keyboards, Qwerty, Shift Keys, Return// Enter Keys

5. Dial Tone- Ring Tones

6. Taping audio and video

1. Object Demonstration: Scavenger hunt for computers in the room

2. Look for Laptops, phones, PDAs watches, hearing aids, clocks, projectors, portable recorders, cameras etc…

3. They are all computers… It’s all zeros and ones. Computers are limited by the restrictions of the Hardware and software. And By the imaginations of their users

   1. physical vs market– business limitations.

4. What are computers for?

5. What is the Internet For?

   1. Give my “Facebook is for wrecking marriages” example.

6. Give examples of how the Killer App for something may differ from what the designers intended.

7. An argument for openness

8. Examples of how children use computers

   1. My daughter conducting interviews at Podcasters Across Borders.

   2. O– 3 years old touches screen to try click on videos—He knows how computers SHOULD behave.

   3. I have a smartboard in my classroom. It changes both how I teach and how I interact with computers.

   4. Once you have a touch interface you can tell how it becomes instantly indispensable– by the fingerprints on the screen.

9. How my use of metaphor restricted me in my podcast.

10. Metaphors I wish to touch upon that affect us as social media power users.

    1. Podcast:
    • Uncle Seth Song: You Don’t Need an IPOD
    • NO– You don’t need an IPOD.
    • Play–George Motoc’s metaphor of podcast like a newspaper. From his excellent podcast series, “What is a podcast?“
    • Why the term podcast stuck– For certain tech savvy people (like us) it instantly resonated and we could see the potential of audio and visual media and programs available on demand on the internet and brought directly to you through the magic of RSS.

    • It gained a life of its own as the phenomenon grew.

    • Why the term “podcasting” sucks.

    • NO– You don’t need an IPOD.

    • Apple is VERY overprotective and litigious re: the phonemes “POD”– so watch out

    • It’s limiting social media to a very narrow kind of mostly audio programming. We need other terms for vidcasting, multimedia chatrooms, youtube, microblogging etc…
    • What other terms do we use?

    
    

11. Friends

    • Friendsters vs Friends

    • Imaginary Friends

    
    
    Community

    • From a hobbyist’s perspective

    • From a business//marketing perspective

    • From a faith perspective

    • Community Divas

1. Bottom line. It is important to examine the metaphors we use to understand the devices and processes. We can be limited by the metaphors we bring with us. Our metaphors may also mask ‘but what is it really for.’