Last night was the 4th meetup of the Vancouver BeerCasting Squad. We got together at Subeez again, and this time the Vancouver Weblogger Meetup Group joined us too making for a nice big crowd and lots of new faces.
Here’s the list of people who showed AND wrote their name down on the list. 🙂
Ian King – IanKing.ca
Bill Stilwell – marginalia.org
Pete Quilly – addcoach4u.com
Roland Tanglao – vaneats.com
Richard Eriksson – JustAGwaiLo
Dead Dalke
Peter Stathakos – geekswithblogs.net/pstathakos
Bryan Rieger – bryanrieger.com
Will Pate – willpate.org
Matt Musselman – onomopoeia.org
Chris Vandebeek
Hans Dykman
Boris Mann – bmannconsulting.com
Tyler Douglas – ironpoint.com
Rog – rog.gameslate.com
Arieanna Foley – vancouvercoffee.ca
Ianiv Schweber – blogaholics.ca
Aryan de Jager
Corey Gleitman
Jamie Furlong – blog.filmgoerjuan.com
Shane Birley – shanesworld.ca
Darren Inouye – darreninouye.com
Ballsdoozledorf
John Goodall – litefeeds.com
Hundred North – 100 N
C-Lo
Black Siren
Unfortunately, the actual BeerCasts turned out really poorly. Not the content, it was great… we did 6 epdisodes on topics like “Who I Would Have Chosen To Be Pope”, “Tell Me About Your Secret Dreams”, and “Living Up to Daddy’s Expecations”. We had 20+ people actually podcast and they were really funny and clever. But alas, the mics and levels seemed to be all messed in the new podcasting setup we have and people’s voices are barely audible. The music in Subeez was a lot louder than in the past too and I suspected that may be a problem.
Anway, I’m sorry I don’t have audio to post this AM. Here are some photos from the get together… and I’m going to see if I can clean up the audio enough so that it’s worth posting. If any of you are experts in this kind of stuff please drop me a line and let me pick your brain.
In other BeerCasting related news (via Peter), Greg launched his company sparkcasting today. He has a cool new site up and new description of what they do.
“SparkCastingâ„¢ enables its clients to source an unlimited supply of frank and honest opinion directly from their audience, about anything and everything that is important to them. Intimate groups of individuals are culled together in a relaxed setting to offer up uncensored conversation based on set of topics which have been developed with our client to tease out and capture relevant information. After the sessions, SparkCastingâ„¢ creates an interactive archive which is then disseminated to a much wider audience in order to generate and collect additional observation and comment. This direct line of communication allows our clients to tap straight into the pulse of their respective audience, providing invaluable feedback into what they think, how they feel and what they want.”
I can’t put my finger on it yet but something here makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m very supportive of Greg and everything he’s done to get this to where it is and I support his valient efforts to turn his passions into a business. When I pulled these things together for the Vancouver crowd I wasn’t working under the assumption that we were going to morph this project into some sort of new fangled Web 2.0 podcast enabled focus group.
Are we going to start paying BeerCasters to show up? Are we going to find out how much corporations are willing to pay to “harvest” our conversations? I dunno, I want to hear more about this and what it means for the participants. I want to make sure whatever we do is good for the participants who come out to these events for the fun, the community and the converstation and are skeptical about corporations having an interest in the project. We could always just start VanCasting if we don’t like the way it feels. In fact, we could sell them back to SparkCasting if we feel like it or directly to the interested parties.
UPDATE: I’ve talked to Greg several times over the weekend and he’s assured me that things aren’t exactly as they seem and he wrote a big post today adding some clarity to the issues I brought up. Thanks Greg, I totally think more detail is what was needed. I trust Greg and think he has good intenetions. I know it’s complex and there are still some questions outstanding, but I would love to know what you guys think about Beercasting and podcasting in light of his comments.