As I wandered around the DEMO conference last week, I was struck by the strong presence of both John Furrier from Podtech and Greg Galant of VentureVoice. John set up shop right on the show floor and was grabbing people as they passed by to engage in conversations about the conference and the new technology being demoed. Greg on the other hand had produced an excellent piece about VideoEgg preparing for DEMO and was at the conference following up on his original piece. My sense was that both John and Greg were adding a lot to the conversation.
It was a nice change of pace to see audio journalism represented at the DEMO conference. Of all the time I've spent at conferences, I think Jan ZIff of sound*bytes is the only traditional radio journalist I've ever met. She is certainly a pleasure to chat with and a wonderful journalist but it was nice to see the upstart podcasters in force at DEMO. John and Greg didn't need to negotiate distribution deals with radio stations to make their voices heard. They only needed a few hundred bucks in recording equipment and a blog on which to post their audio files. It is incredibly democratizing when you think about it.
As I thought about it, I was finally inspired to actually start podcasting myself. Below you'll find a link to my inaugural show on VentureCast, the VentureBlog Podcast. I hope you enjoy it.