Podcast Hotel

Thursday, April 19, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I described the idea of a podcast hotel in a Trade Secrets podcast with Adam Curry in 2004 or early 2005. The idea was pretty simple. Rent a cheap hotel in the middle of nowhere. I was thinking St Augustine Beach, FL. A few meeting rooms, a decent-sized ballroom with lots of tables and chairs, we truck in food, high-caffeine soft drinks, and a bunch of connectivity and wifi. Spend $100K and everyone rents their own room. Double-up if the price is prohibitive. Car pool. Swim in the ocean. Walk on the beach. 

Spend a week there, writing code, blog stuff, doing podcasts around the clock. This was in the early days when you could fit all the podcasters in a dinky beach hotel. Then, basically -- you'd get infinite connectivity if you stayed long enough. Everyone would get to know each other, and there would be a dozen podcasts that were great, tons of great ideas, and out of that would come a roadmap for all of us. And a great memory of when we worked together, to help launch an industry, a new human activity. 

Unfortunately it never happened, for a lot of good reasons, mostly that it's hard to get people to work together. 

Now in San Francisco, tomorrow and Saturday, there will be a conference at the Swedish American meeting hall on Market St, that is called Podcast Hotel, but it's a pretty ordinary conference, not even an unconference, and nothing like the podcast hotel we envisioned.  

I may stop in tomorrow or Saturday to schmooze a bit, shake hands, listen to a bit of stage-talk, and wonder What If.