Get together

The week­end of Octo­ber 5 and 6 was Pod­Camp Den­ver 3, a con­fer­ence I led with the help of sev­eral very smart people.

It was a great time of shar­ing ideas and learn­ing from each other. We broke into two groups and learned about thing rang­ing from the role of maps in mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the lat­est in search engine opti­miza­tion tech­niques. Every­thing related to com­mu­ni­cat­ing ideas using the internet.

Even though every­one at Pod­Camp spends their work days on com­put­ers with vir­tual groups, we all see the value of meet­ing in real life. Some­times, you can learn so much more in hours of face-to-face meet­ings than from days of vir­tual meetings.

The point of this post is not to talk about geeky things like what we dis­cussed — but rather to say it’s very much worth your while to spend time with other pro­fes­sion­als in your field. If you don’t know about where groups like that are, start by look­ing for them. If you can’t find any, start a group! If you live in a small town, travel to a big­ger town and start a group there. Becky did.

Finally, get together with a group out­side of your place of employ­ment. You see those peo­ple enough. Even if you’re part of a huge cor­po­ra­tion, you need the per­spec­tive of peo­ple from out­side your company’s niche.

The photo was taken with an iPhone, using iOS6. The panorama fea­ture is amaz­ingly easy to use — if not per­fect. If you click on the photo, you can see a larger ver­sion.