I recently returned from the New Media Expo. The expo was a great opportunity to meet other podcasters and spread the word about the Science Podcasters site. Here are my impressions and a few of the people I met. My goals for Science Podcasters were to invite other science and medical podcasters to join the site and to run the Medical podcaster’s meet up.

I’ll start off with the Medical Podcaster’s meet up which was held on Friday morning before the Will It Blend keynote. In attendance were:

• David Van Nuys (Dr. Dave) from The Shrink Rap Radio Podcast
• Shwen Gwee from the Med 2.0 Podcast
• Matt Gunn and Carina Stanton from AORN (Association of periOperative Registered Nurses)
• And me, Jamie Davis from the MedicCast and Nursing Show podcasts.

Also in attendance at my invitation were the guys from RawVoice.com. They are working to help arrange avenues for advertising in the medical and science space. They are all podcasters themselves and run the Blubrry Podcast community. They offered some insights into promoting podcasts, gaining listeners, and attracting advertising.

The group discussed how we marketed our podcasts and we all decided that we should do more cross promotion between medical and science podcasts. Dr. Dave offered to interview others on any psychological topic or to be interviewed on someone else’s show. The folks from AORN are just getting started in podcasting for their membership and welcome input and crossover promotion.

Also discussed were methods of gaining and assessing audience and website statistics. The Raw Voice team has a pretty good statistics package in both a free and a premium version. Barry Kranz from Raw Voice also suggested Quantcast.com as a way to gain info on site traffic. Other statistics sources included Podtrac’s free stats program and the resources available through Libsyn.com and Wizzard Media.

There were also some discussions about the gathering of survey information about listeners. Survey Monkey came up as a service that offers both free and paid services. Also, both Wizzard Media and Podtrac offer advertiser surveys for podcasters.

In addition to the Medical Podcasters Meet up, I also had an opportunity to talk with many other science and medical podcasters, including Donovan Steutel from ScienceAudio.net and Robert Frederick from Science Magazine. I invited them to check out the Science Podcasters site and consider joining in the cross promotion of their podcasts and sites.

In the NME exhibit hall, I found many vendors focused on helping podcasters to use online video. For those of us in the education sector, there were several options available in both software and hardware. Since I was speaking about using podcasting and new media in higher education, I was interested in ways lecturers could record their classes for later use by students.

Two software options stood out for the education marketplace. On the individual podcasters or instructor level there was Profcast from Humble Daisy software. This is currently a Mac only application but a windows version is on the way. For institutional uses, there is Panopto.com. This software package may be free to educational institutions under their charter from Carnegie Mellon University where it was developed.

The expo was a huge success from my viewpoint and I can’t wait for next year’s show. If you are a science or medical podcaster, you need to make plans to attend next year’s show.