It’s official. PodCamp Montreal is a success. We had 384 participants on site, and 731 unique visitors checking out our live stream throughout the weekend. While our American friends were more likely to follow us on the livestream this year, we were thrilled to attract a greater number of locals to this year’s event, given that our mission is to encourage and promote the use of social media by Montrealers. Our schedule was nicely divided between French and English presentations, and the Montreal sun came out to grace us with its presence, which is always nice when you’re sitting on the great terrasse at l’UQAM’s Design School where PodCamp was held for a second consecutive year.

Bob Goyetche by Eva Blue

PodCamp Montreal is a labour of love that doesn’t happen overnight. The organising committee has been working tirelessly since spring on sponsorship, communications and logistics, not to mention climbing into bed together to produce a rockin’ promotional video. The sacrifices we make for social media!

It’s been great to get all your positive feedback and suggestions for next year. Thanks for coming, for supporting the development of social media in Montreal and hope to see you in 2010!

Photo courtesy of Marko Kulik

Bottom : Jean-François Blais, Julien Smith, Michelle Sullivan, Sylvain Grand’Maison
Top : Laurent LaSalle, Hugh McGuire, Bob Goyetche
Absent : Laurent Maisonnave, Mitch Joel and Harold Boeck

We were also very lucky to be supported by volunteers, including students from Harold’s University of Sherbrooke class, Ile sans fil who provided the wifi, Christian Aubry and Manuel Angelini who, along with Laurent Maisonnave, were behind the camera for our live streaming, and Marko Kulik and Eva Blue, who were our official photographers.

Finally, thanks to all of you for making this inaugural event a big success. See you next year!

He can be heard regularly on Canadian Podcast Buffet and Just One More Book.

Producing and promoting a podcast is a lot like putting together an interlocking stone walkway : you need to make each piece fit, flow into the next piece and the end result should be attractive to use. It also takes a lot of hard work.

This session explores the decisions made (and the rationale behind them) in launching a niche-specific podcast for a non-technical audience, the evolution of the production and promotion of the podcast over a two-year period and how the audience grew from 20 to 2000 downloads a day.

Mark’s session is schedule on Saturday morning at 9:00.

A week ago, we opened registration. Since then, a good number of interesting speaking proposals have been submitted. Here’s a preliminary list of what you can expect to see and hear at PodCamp Montreal 2008 :

Other potential speakers will be announced later on, as topics are confirmed. Maybe we can expect more proposal related to podcasting?

Video promos

Are you one of this year’s PodCamp Montreal speakers? If so, we want to hear from you… literally. Post a 2 minute video promoting your session on YouTube and/or Dailymotion with the words PodCamp Montreal 2008 in the title and join the tag pcmtl with the video. Send us a link and we’ll post it in our blog. A good way to get some pre-conference buzz going.