A few of you may have noticed PodCamp Atlanta had a really kickass first year in 2007, and then nothing happened after that. Why? A few reasons, I think:
- Amber did almost all the organizing of the first one herself. She moved on to organize Sex 2.0, and organizing PodCamp Atlanta 2 apparently was more work than the person who was supposed to do it anticipated it would be. So it languished, and the dates kept getting pushed out. The next one is supposedly scheduled for sometime later this year or in 2010, but I’ll believe it when I see it. And lest it sound like I’m just throwing this one person under the bus, I should note that not much of anybody else in the community stepped up to help her out when it was clear she wouldn’t be able to handle it on her own.
- The first PodCamp Atlanta happened when there were barely any cheap or free social media events/tech events of any size in Atlanta (other than SoCon, I can’t name one, but it’s possible there were others I wasn’t aware of). So there was pent-up demand. Not long after, many such events started popping up. Barely a week passes now without a similar event. Perhaps as it should be, demand for a new PodCamp would depend entirely on people with an interest in podcasting, which leads us to…
- Podcasting is sooooooooo 2007. Which is to say, the hype around podcasting and the curiosity about making podcasts among people who weren’t already making them has waned. Contrary to the (insert tech that’s more than a year old) is dead meme that inevitably goes around, podcasting is actually more popular then ever. But I posit it’s a different kind of popularity: that of a familiar commodity, not one of an emergent new technology.
I mention all this for a couple of reasons.
First, someone at Georgia Tech offered a venue and some administrative support for another PodCamp Atlanta. The offer was made on the Google Group to anyone who would grab the reigns and do a little work to make it happen.
My belief is PodCamp was something that was great for Atlanta in 2007, but its time has passed and that the time and energy at this point would be better spent on something else. I think if the demand was truly there for a sequel to this event, that the community would have stepped up and made it happen already. It didn’t.
However, neither Amber or I would be doing any of the organizing, so our opinion doesn’t count any more than anyone else’s. If you think I’m wrong (or if you think I’m right for that matter), please say so.
In the short term, if you have energy to burn, volunteer to help Derek and Swoopy with the Dragon*Con podcasting track. Even if they are past needing help with anything this year (don’t know, you’ll have to ask), they probably wouldn’t mind having new contacts to keep in mind for next year.
Second, you may have also noticed our podcast production of Mostly ITP has slowed down, and that there are fewer active podcasters on the Georgia Podcast Network now than there were a year or two ago.
The site has been running on Drupal 5 ever since the redesign from a little over a year ago. I could write a lengthy screed on the positive and negative aspects of running a website with Drupal, but unfortunately for this question I have to focus on one glaring negative: modules are not compatible from one major version to the next.
That means when you upgrade a site running Drupal to a new major version, it can be a serious undertaking if you have a bunch of custom modules like we do on the Georgia Podcast Network. Drupal 7 is coming out soon, and once that happens Drupal 5 will eventually stop getting necessary security patches.
So, we have a decision to make sometime in the near future:
- Do a lot of work to get the modules running on Drupal 6 or Drupal 7
- Move to a different system
- Shutter the site completely/convert it to an archive of static pages
I’ve done a little preliminary research, and it would actually be pretty easy to port the data out of Drupal and into Wordpress MU. It would require me to build at least two Wordpress themes though (one for the front page/directory, and one customizable theme for individual podcasts), which wouldn’t be a trivial amount of work. So what I’m trying to decide is whether it’s worth the effort to either port it to Wordpress MU or to upgrade the modules, or whether it’s time to move on. I would love to get some honest feedback from people who use the site.
If you have a podcast on the site, don’t worry yet, I’m just thinking out loud. If we were to decide to shut the site down, you’d get all your data and we could set up redirects to your new hosting so search engines and iTunes/RSS subscribers wouldn’t miss a beat. We would make sure a transition went as smoothly as possible. And there’s still a strong possibility Mostly ITP would live on hosted on a separate site somewhere.
