For podcast hosts out there that attend conferences, especially those that only do Face-to-Face interviews like us, I’d so recommend making the most of these moments.

You get to speak to people you wouldn’t normally come in contact with, plus you get to ride on the coat-tails of the buzz that the conference creates. 

Craig and I have experienced this recently attending Open Source Developers Conference and YOW, recording for our podcast Coding By Numbers. We recorded 3 at OSDC and 2 at YOW, and so far they are own highest downloaded episodes. 

The 3 from OSDC are:

• http://www.codingbynumbers.com/2011/12/coding-by-numbers-episode-31-perl.html
• http://www.codingbynumbers.com/2011/12/coding-by-numbers-episode-32-open.html
• http://www.codingbynumbers.com/2011/12/coding-by-numbers-episode-33-michael.html

Just a few tips from me:

1. Get the organiser’s permission. You probably don’t need it, but it’s always polite to do so. It also helps with number 2
2. Ask the organisers if there is a quiet room you can use, they usually have a breakout rooms or unused conference rooms that you can loan for an hour
3. Make contact with your interviewees early in the conference and try and do the interview after their talk so they are in that euphoric post talk mood!
4. Make sure your interviewees understand when the podcast will go out and what the licence on it is. Also tell them if you are going to edit or not (we don’t)
5. Most importantly - use social media and buzz to your advantage. If people are raving about a particular speaker that you are going to interview (in our case this was Mike Lee at Yow) then make sure people know about it and give them the link. When you finally post the show, make sure you use the conference hashtag and follow up with the people that you originally talked about. They will be your evangelists.

@aspinall and I have finally got around to arranging our own meetup. It’s based around a lot of the things we talk about on the podcast, but we are trying to focus on all the topics that none of the other meetups cover (we’ll leave the Java stuff to http://www.meetup.com/qldjvm). 

We are holding the meetings at Brisbane Square (Suncorp, L28) on the 2nd Monday of each month and the first meetup (March 14th) is on #golang. Please come along and join us, hopefully we will expand your horizons a little.

For those that attended the Google Go Tutorial at linux.conf.au here is the link to the podcast interview that I did the week before the conference. Hope you find it useful. For those interest in Go that live in Brisbane we are hoping to do a session on GO very soon - watch this space.