*I* deas » Podworks.in

Podworks.in

Posted on 11th June 2007 by Taggy

The past weekend was spent well,attending podworks.in .For those who don’t know podworks.in is touted to be India’s biggest audio and video podcasting workshop style unconference .

It was well attended by close to 200 professionals and had so much to learn from it .This event was conducted by the knowledge foundation based in chennai ,the team behind the barcamp chennai ,blogcamp,proto.in and many other successful events in chennai .This being a community event ,all the speakers were people who were attending the workshop and it was fun to learn from people who themselves do what they are speaking .

The first day of the workshop focussed on Audio podcasting .

Introduction ,welcome speech by Kiruba ( The guy behind kirubashow )
Karthik Kannan spoke about creating a audio podcast in 10 minutes .

The talk comprised of how to use simple tools to acheive this and also professional toolset available.

The other lecture was by Chinmayee ( RJ/Singer/host on vijay television ).

She talked about how to maintain your body language and voice during a podcast .Tips for having a good voice included drinking less amount of water as possible and preferring to use saliva as the natural fluid lubricant and also to avoid using word/expressions like Ah ,oh ,i see,but ,aana ( tamil) and similar words during a podcast which according to her are orgasmic sounds and unappropriate .

The next session was tips on using wordpress by sridhar rao,vibeesh and himanshu.

It was disappointing to say the least they talked about creating wordpress.com accounts to start blogging.The topics varied from how easy PHP was ( wonder why they would talk about PHP ) to difference between hosted wordpress blog and your own install . It was quite boring and few people managed to start another session on audacity on the first floor conference hall .That was some fun learning to use audacity ,iam a first time user and it helped one start off .

The next talk by Sunil Nair ( CEO ,Nautanki.tv) about monetizing your blogs or web content .This was the best talk atleast to me and dealt in depth about how to serve your contents to people and if you should focus on a particular user space on the web .

Then the red bull came in ;) it was nice

The talks resumed and the it was money again by Mr.Venkatesh ( Sify Manager ) on making monetizing for underprivileged . It was nice to see someone so up the ladder making efforts to reach up to people .
That was the last and the beach party at ECR was to follow ,however me,alagu ,suren and hari deciding to spend the evening at the marina and we had a great time playing around :) .and the huge sivaji hoarding kept me waiting :D

The second kicked off a bit late but was in my opinion a lot better :) .The second day was all about video podcasting .

First talk by Sridhar Ranganathan the product manager from Y! on how to get your blogs discovered by search engines . He talked about how to add meta information and making your content more reasonable for the bots to be able to ping your site often .

Then followed two wondeful presentations .

First by Vivin mathew from CNN-IBN on how to make an interesting podcast . he also talked about the usual length of podcast and how to make it more appealing by choosing the places to shoot and how to strip down the original content and get your audience attention . You can watch the video taken by alagu here

Vivin Mathew at Podworks.in from Allagappan M on Vimeo

Then was a super session from Mr.Shashi Kumar a freelance cameraman for NAT-GEO and also the man behing Chennai -600028 movie .He talked about the basics of making a perfect picture ( terms like aperture,frame,line of sight ) and also urging people not to look too deep into the basics and to learn it by the way of actually doing it.Something he admits is how he became one .He never finished a course on photigraphy :) .

Shashikumar @ Podworks.in from Allagappan M on VimeoPost lunch it was a small concert by Krish Ashok with his violin and he was great :) although hi didn’t look like a violin guy ( he wore a iron maiden tshirt ) .