Michael Gaines, Sarah Vela, Sarah Curtis, Tracy Apps, PhilCampbell and I did a live version of PushMyFollow at PodCampBoston and during the discussion we came up with the idea of PodCamp Graduate School.

PodCamps always attract lots of people that are newbies to social media, and that’s wonderful because it’s far and away a better place to learn and connect than a traditional conference or seminar. And new people keep it fresh and exciting, injecting new ideas and opportunities to make friends.

But in the two years since the first PodCamp, in which just about everyone was a newbie, the state of social media has advanced. There are now a lot of PodCamp veterans that are beyond the “what is Twitter?” or “Social Media Marketing is about listening” stage. There are now people with some experience who want to share more advanced topics or ideas, who have gotten to the next level and want to keep breaking ground. For them, maybe there should be a slate of Graduate Level sessions. Maybe session presenters could tag their content like colleges number their courses. 100-level courses are for neophytes, 400 and 500 level courses are for more advanced topics. Someone suggested even listing prerequisites for sessions. I could have used this in my session on Distributed Microblogging. Because I wasn’t sure of the overall level of knowledge of my audience, I spent some time covering the basics of Twitter and microblogging. I then ran out of time before I could get to the part where I’d hoped to tap their collective wisdom about user-centric publishing. Had I listed the “course level”, I might have been able to get into the more interesting issues that I missed out on. In retrospect, I could have broken the talk into two sessions, a 100 or 200 level course on microblogging and a 400 or 500 level course on User Centric messaging. The ideas and concepts from the first could have been a prerequisite for the second.

I’ll wrap up with some observations about this PodCamp. The Joseph Martin Center at Harvard Medical School was the best PodCamp venue I’ve been to, by a long shot. It was comfortable in spite of 90+degree heat in Boston, spacious and modern with lots of conversation-friendly areas. It had excellent A/V equipment that worked without a hitch and without fiddling or head-scratching (for me at least). And get this: FREE PARKING right under the building. Free Parking? In Boston? That’s unheard of. I was smiling ear-to-ear upon arriving and discovering that unexpected present. There was an outage of the wi-fi on Saturday, but by afternoon it had returned. In classic right-hand-doesn’t-know-what-left-hand-is-doing style, the IT dept. had apparently scheduled a server downtime over the weekend.

The placement of food and vendor tables could have been better, as they both caused some serious congestion. Things like this that are cause people to stop and talk or make up plates of food should NOT have a major traffic path going through them. Pathways should be kept open, and stopping places should have plenty of open space in front of them.

The somewhat controversial $50 entry fee worked well in discouraging no-shows and ensuring that there were serious campers there. The crowd was, in my opinion, just the right size. I had the feeling I’d seen just about everyone there at least once. After PodCampNYC and the last PodCampBoston, there was some discussion about how big a podcamp can get and still have that camp-like feel, in which you “know” at least by sight almost every person there. This one had that nice feeling. I just find that experience viscerally different than one in which you are part of a huge, overwhelming crowd. You want that family, we’re-all-in-this-together feeling and about 300 seems to be tops for that. The venue did contribute to a positive experience, though, because it kept us all together and well-mixed, unlike PodCampNYC in which people were spread out across several buildings.

So that’s a wrap on PodCampBoston3. Thanks to the organizing committee for all their hard work and did I mention…. FREE PARKING?

Holy Moly! This coming Friday is PodCampNYC 2. I’m doing a session called “OpenID for Newbies” and I have to get cracking on getting the PowerPoint together. Fortunately, I have much of the source material already in the form of an OpenID preso I did at PodCampBoston2 last fall.

I’m really looking forward to this PodCamp because I’ve met so many people online since the first PodCampNYC about a year ago, and I want to meet them in person. In particular, I can’t wait to “virtureal” (meet in person someone one knows only online) my co-podcasters on PushMyFollow, Annie Boccio (@banannie), Christine Cavalier (@purplecar) and Michael Gaines (@istarman), all of whom live in the Jersey, Philly area.

Two more virtureals I’ve been wanting to make for a long time are video editor extraordinaire Bill Cammack (@billcammack) and video podcast goddess Roxanne Darling (@roxannedarling). I’ve gotten to know Bill through mutual friends online. If it works out time-wise, I’d love to meet up with Bill at the beer mecca Burp Castle in the East Village, where I’ve seen him in so many Flickr photos.

I’ve known Roxanne in the online sense for well over a year. Her Beachwalks with Rox is one of the longest running videoblogs/podcasts on the net. I have to say, Beachwalks was one of my inspirations to get into vlogging and social media. We’ve been promising each other for months that one day we’d meet up and I’ve even gotten a proxy-hug from Rox through Laura Fitton (@pistachio), but now it’s finally going to happen! Yay!

I’m also looking forward to renewing in-person friendships with NYC peeps like Kathryn Jones, Jesse Chenard, Grace Piper and Charles Hope that I haven’t seen in a while. A special ex-Boston-now-NYC friend I haven’t seen since her farewell party last November is Julia Roy (@juliaroy).

One technically oriented meetup I want to make is with David Recordon, the young distributed applications guru and OpenID advocate. I have a lot of the same interests in trying to break down the walled gardens of social media and social networking, and David is a leader in that movement.

But yeah, although there is plenty of cool content to consume in the sessions, it’s pretty obvious that the real reason I go to podcamps is for the friendships. I’m thankful that I don’t have to justify the “business value” of going to podcamp to some finance department troll in Corporate America. I’m the CEO of me, and I say it’s worth it.