How are podcasts changing the convention scene?

I listen to a few gaming podcasts (I have a 45-minute commute each way, etc) and this year many podcasters made the effort to attend GenCon. Some of them did Origins, GenCon, Dragoncon and more. (I think their wallets will not like that in the long run.)

What's interesting about that to me is this: I think many of these podcasters went because other podcasters were going. For some of them, this was their first time at GenCon or even their first convention. So the podcasters go to GenCon, and they all talk about it on their podcasts, present interviews and so on . This happened last year... this year, more podcasters went.

What I'm wondering is, how will this affect the listening audience? How many of them will decide to go because they keep hearing about what it was like from the podcasters? Or just because now they "know" someone at the convention?

Of course, from what I'm hearing, the podcasters hang out with their peers, not their fans. They run into fans, but it's their fellow podcasters that they sit in the bar and talk with.

Which brings me to the other interesting phenomenon, which I think is more prominent in podcasting than it was with blogs and the web in general... once you start podcasting, you are instantly an expert on the subject.

Which brings me to the thing I've been toying with for awhile... doing my own roleplaying podcast. I don't think the things I want to talk about are represented in the "podosphere." Basically, I want to get at the core of roleplaying and talk about ways to improve my skills. I'd talk about indie/"story" games tangentially, but I'm not heavily into them... I steal bits and pieces that are helpful to me, but I'm not looking for a "narrative" experience... I don't want to tell a story, I want to experience a story. Most story-games don't work for me because the mechanics are about who has narrative rights... who gets to tell the story, and the mechanics may not even be tied to what's going on in the story at all.

So we'd talk some about rules and finding good rules to support the kind of play "we" are looking for. But it'd be about more than rules... it would be about improving our play experience using whatever methods we can come up with.

I want to talk about crazy things like using improv acting tools to improve roleplaying skills. Yes, the Durham 3 have taken some improv classes and talked about the experience off and on, but they haven't actually given listeners anything they can use. I'm thinking of actual experiments and exercises. I've got some interesting books on the shelf here (Johnstone, Spolin, et al) that I think hold some useful bits.

I'd talk about some other non-gaming resources... books on writing (Vogler) and screenplays (Field), for instance, that I think have something worth looking at. I'm not the first, by any means... I was introduced to Syd Field by Theatrix. But I think there's a lot more there than most people know about. (Syd Field's screenplay model, and specifically his explanation of where almost all writers struggle, revealed to me where, and why, I needed to spend more time pre-planning for adventures.)

So I think I've got enough material to keep me talking for weeks on end (every other week, I think). And I think I have something to say that hasn't been said before, or hasn't been articulated well or widely, at least. You can probably tell I've pretty much talked myself into it. And anyway, I need to justify all this recording equipment I bought a few months ago.

My wife and I actually recorded a session about dice and fudge/plot/fate/karma points, which I'm going to stick and intro and outro onto this weekend and post it, even if it's the only one that ever goes up.