Northern Voice 2010 kicks off today. Last year I made the trip up to UBC for both days of the conference but this year's date change has made it difficult to take Friday's off so I'm skipping today's adventures and will, instead, watch the twitter stream from afar.
The conference has become a great place to meet bloggers and get some great tips and ideas for the year while also giving me the opportunity to see people that I generally don't see throughout the year (namely local bloggers and social media types). I usually over pack for the day carrying a backpack with more stuff than I really need but this year, I'm going to try the conference on a much lighter note while also putting my N900 to the test. The plan: to pack only the phone, extra batteries, a charger (just in case), my Kodak pocket cam and perhaps, if the weather holds up, my DSLR. Hopefully that'll mean a variety of coverage including more video, perhaps a little live streaming (which I've only attempted twice before) audio and pictures. We'll see how the experiment goes.
If you're looking for full coverage, I advise you stay tuned to Twitter (hash tag #nv10), flickr (images tagged nv10 & northernvoice) and for more in-depth updates like live blogs, I suggest checking out Miss 604.
Sometime back I discovered that my little camera actually records some pretty decent video. Nothing spectacular but it does the job of capturing the moment and the microphone is pretty decent considering we're talking about a fairly middle-of-the-road digital camera. I've taken a couple of short little movies and done nothing with them but today, I happened to have an SD nearby with a video clip along with some spare time so I thought I'd check out the services at blip.tv which I discovered at NV.
It's nothing spectacular (Colleen and I talking about the weather and getting up early) but it's fun. At this point, I'll also direct your attention to my Flickr set with a bunch of pictures from NV including the shot of the North Vancouver sunrise which is pictured above. I must admit, I'm quite impressed by how beautiful that looks.
I don't really want to call it "the weekend from hell" but I must admit that as much fun as I had and as much as I learned, this was a hellish sort of weekend full of interesting tidbits which left me drained.
Northern Voice 2008 was a huge success and I have a load of post ideas that came out of it which will be forthcoming in the next few days but I needed a bit of a laugh this morning so I though I'd share my solution.
The keynote speaker at NV was Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and in the midst of his great talk (audio of which is coming soon - at least I think I have audio...4GB of audio is a lot of stuff to filter through...) he brought up a few peeves and one of them was that his Google ranking was being overtaken by another Matt, a Matt I'd never heard about.
The leading Matt is from a website called Where the Hell is Matt? and essentially, he's a guy who travels the world and dances at each new location. The truly funny bit is that Matt dances "like a white guy" (aka. not very well).
It's pretty darn funny and I can't help but watch the video below (a collection of Matt's dances from 2006) and laugh.
It is also worth noting that when you now type "Matt " into Google, Matt Mullenweg does come in at the number one spot. I wonder if it has anything to do with his presentation at NV?
Photo of Matt Mullenweg from Flickr care of duanestorey.
I met a pushy blogger. Really nice, but out to get her way. Can't say I blame her though...
She was bitching about a sticker she picked up at the conference and why, oh WHY, would any company use Vanilla Ice to advertise? Dude, it's Vanilla Freakin' Ice! It's genius!
I offered to trade something for it, I figured a few bucks would do the trick. Instead, she asked for a link. Thanks Raincoaster - the sticker ROCKS!
Update (6:04PM): Just for fun, I tracked down the video with that infamous line. Check it:
So I'm sitting here between session, madly trying to catch up on uploading audio and a little birdie comes by and shares some wicked information.
From a few of the sessions, I've noticed that there are some folks at the conference that aren't local to Vancouver but I didn't realize that some people came from so far away.
I'm sitting here trying to figure out who came the farthest but frankly, my geography skills suck so I'll let you figure that one out for yourself. Here's the list:
Abbotsford Bellevue Berkeley Bowen Island Burnaby Caledon Calgary Chilliwack Coquitlam Duncan Edmonton Fairbanks Fort St. John Fredericksburg Gibsons Kalamazoo Kamloops Lions Bay Los Angeles Lynnwood Millburn Monroe Mountain View New Westminster New York North Vancouver Olympia Ottawa Playa Del Rey Port Coquitlam Port Moody Portland Prince George Reston Richmond Richmond Hill Roberts Creek Salt Spring Island San Francisco Sausalito Scottsdale Seattle St Thomas Surrey Toronto Vancouver Victoria White Rock
Here are the regions (12) people are from:
Alaska Alberta Arizona British Columbia California Michigan New Jersey New York Ontario Oregon Virginia Washington
Alright, so this didn't go over as well as planned but I think we'll be good for the second session. I'll still post my notes...once I clean them up. On the other hand, we WILL have audio! Soon at least.
As a test of new technology that I'll be using on a "grander" scale on Sunday during the LIVE OSCAR BLOG (check out all the details) and partly because I want to give something back to the blogging community, I'll be putting myself to the test and blogging all of the sessions I attend at Northern Voice this weekend. Coverage will start with the first session "Bloging 101" at 10:45 tomorrow morning and I intend to cover everything I attend (at the moment it's everything) and the Friday schedule looks like this:
I'm also hopeful that I'll have a chance to record the various sessions on my handy H4 and share those with the masses. I'll be playing that by ear but at the moment, that's the plan.
As for Saturday, I've been trying to devise a schedule but there are a few things that I'm not 100% on yet and which will be fairly spur of the moment but once I have a general idea, the same principles will apply.
It's official. Today I registered for Northern Voice and requested Friday, Feb. 22nd off. I'm all set to go!
To add to the excitement, I also got some fancy, FANCY business cards in the mail from one of the other contributors - they're SO darned professional looking! - so I'm pretty much set to go!
So I made the trip out to UBC on a sleeting Saturday morning. It included a 6:30 AM wake up call (on a day off!) but it was well worth the effort. Fun, entertaining, insightful and above all, informative. I'm really looking forward to next year's conference. Scheming already. World domination is SOOOO close! *mwahahaha*
A bunch of online resources are available for anyone interested in blogging on any level:
Check out the Northern Voice site for all of the info on the 2 day conference (including the non-conference which happened on Friday called Moosecamp).
Cool pictures (who doesn't love those???) from the days of events are available here thanks to the apparent hundreds of cameras (some of which appeared out of no where).
Check out the aggregated content of every Norther Voice participants. Dale set this sucker up and it ROCKS.
