As a guy who's done a fair bit with podcasting over the last couple of years -- both producing my own show and editing episodes for clients -- I'm a strong advocate of using audio and the power of the human voice as a channel for sharing news and stories from conference and other live events.

And since I'll be the guy sporting the brand-spanking-new Zoom H2 digital audio recorder at this year's Community 2.0 Conference
(I just put in the order on Amazon yesterday!), I'm going to make sure we do just that while I'm in Las Vegas next month. My plan is to post a series of short audio interviews throughout the event, as I capture the thoughts, reactions, and learnings from presenters and attendees.

To give you a sense of how other conferences have incorporated podcasting into their events, check out these three examples:

• At AutoDesk University 2007, also held in Las Vegas, business communicator and podcaster Donna Papcosta recorded, edited, and published several podcasts from the floor of the conference. Episode topics ranged from attendees talking about why they had come to the event to a promotion of a specific session at the conference.
  
  
• During UGA Connect, a weekend conference about PR and social media held at the University of Georgia last fall, students posted brief interviews with speakers and participants alike. They also published the audio of the event's main presentations in their entirety, including the keynote address from Bad Pitch Blogger, Kevin Dugan.
  
  
• At the 2007 PRSA International Conference last October, Eric Schwartzman, host of the On the Record Online podcast, spoke with several influential communicators, including Edith Wilson from the World Bank. Those interviews continue to be released on a periodic basis on the official conference blog.
  

Conference podcasts are never a true substitute for attending the actual event, but they can serve a number of useful purposes, depending on when they're released and who's listening: building buzz for an upcoming event, keeping attendees in the loop about alternate sessions or last-minute schedule changes, giving non-participants who are following the event online a sense of what their missing and whetting their appetite to attend the next time, and creating a digital audio repository that will live on in the long tail of the Web.

Bryan Person is a community organizer and social media evangelist from Boston. He blogs at BryanPerson.com.