Open Letter to the San Antonio Podcasting Community

To My Fel­low Podcasters:

Cre­at­ing and being a part of the San Anto­nio Pod­cast­ing Group has been an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. It started as a way for me to find local pod­cast­ers to share my excite­ment about, what at the time was, a ground­break­ing medium.

It’s been 4 years since those hum­ble begin­nings back in Sep­tem­ber 2005. So much has hap­pened since then. We fired up the early adopter tech/geek crowd and have done some first time events here in San Anto­nio. From our small group the New Media/Social Media Com­mu­nity was born.

From Pod­Camp to Bar­Camp to Tweet­Camp we have been pio­neers involved in build­ing what is now a won­der­fully diverse and vibrant com­mu­nity. Pat your­selves on the back for being part of the group and mak­ing things happen.

As New Media evolved to Social Media we have been using the Meetup site less and less. What was once a chatty mes­sage board has become as silent as a library. It’s not that we aren’t still inter­act­ing online, how­ever the loca­tion for our con­ver­sa­tions have been hap­pen­ing on Twit­ter and Facebook.

There doesn’t seem to be a need for us to con­tinue to host the group on Meetup. As we are well aware, Meetup charges orga­niz­ers a fee to host a group. As the use of the Meetup plat­form has become ane­mic, it appears there is no need to con­tinue with the group in it’s cur­rent form.

There are plenty of places for us to host our group out­side of Meetup. There is Ning http://ning.com and even Face­book has a group fea­ture. We still have the SA Pod­cast­ers blog site which Nathan Lott and Leslie Bald­win have been head­ing up for the last year.

I pro­pose we allow the Meetup group to close and con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion on either Ning or Face­book. I believe Ning allows us more fea­tures as well as an extremely fea­ture rich plat­form. It’s my first choice, how­ever I know that for the most part we are all already on Face­book so adding a new group to our exist­ing pro­files would be eas­ier. I’m will­ing to go either way.

I won’t miss Meetup. I will miss inter­act­ing with you, my dear Pod­cast­ing Buds. Know­ing you has enriched my life immensely.

Thanks for join­ing the fun!

Cheers,
Jen­nifer Navarrete

Tags: facebook, group, meetup, ning, podcast, sa podcasters, San Antonio, texas, Twitter