Anyway

That was what we put on the front of the t‑shirts this year, #nv11. Some bright spark (I for­get who, sorry, the two days blur togeth­er a bit) poin­ted out that the t‑shirts were green with NV, which was an impress­ive pun, or at least bet­ter than any­thing I could come up with on my own.

As always, the days were full, and this year I made it to the party at the Aca­dem­ic as well, which gave me a chance to chat to dif­fer­ent people. I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out wheth­er I liked the Moose cock­tail the Aca­dem­ic designed for us or not. The food was good, and the candy bar went down well with everyone.

I man­aged to miss the morn­ing key­note (the school run took pri­or­ity), so for me the ses­sions part of the con­fer­ence star­ted with the first pan­el I mod­er­ated: Court­ing Con­tro­versy: Dan­cing with the Dev­il. Rebecca Cole­man, Kazia Mul­lin, and Lor­raine Murphy had everything so well organ­ised that I did­n’t need to do any­thing, I just sat there and watched and listened, pre­pared to help if they needed it (which they did­n’t). They have all sum­mar­ised their takes on the pan­el; there are lots of use­ful hints in there as to how to deal with con­tro­versy (and any­one who allows any sorts of com­ments will). I’m glad I got to listen to this one.

I sat in on the Social Media and Online Defam­a­tion: Keep­ing Out of Court pan­el for a bit, some inter­est­ing inform­a­tion there about the upcom­ing Supreme Court decision on wheth­er link­ing to some­thing libel­lous means that you are con­sidered to have libelled someone your­self, which is a fright­en­ing concept and will def­in­itely have a chilling effect on spread­ing news if it goes the wrong way. Rob Cot­ting­ham has a sum­mary in car­toon form. It was inter­est­ing com­par­ing this pan­el with the court­ing con­tro­versy one; “play it safe” vs “be brave”.

I did­n’t make it to any ses­sions after that on the Fri­day, deal­ing with vari­ous issues or chat­ting with people in the atri­um, but I did make it to the Town­ship 7 winetast­ing, albeit at the end. And then, of course, the party.

The party was fol­lowed by the morn­ing after, being in time to wel­come people to the second day and intro­duce Chris Wilson for his key­note From Dial-up Modems to Post-“Social Media”: A Jour­ney. I enjoyed it, espe­cially when he reminded us all just how fast tech­no­logy has changed and how much of what is avail­able today would have seemed unbe­liev­able 10 or 15 years ago. 

After lunch I mod­er­ated Tim’s Sex, Lies, and Wiki­pe­dia talk, which, of course, did­n’t need much mod­er­a­tion. Tim has­n’t writ­ten up his talk, but a search on “Tim Bray wiki­pe­dia #nv11″ will bring up lots of sum­mar­ies writ­ten by others.

Anthony Mar­co’s Pod­cast­ing with Soul: Try A Little Ten­der­ness was a mix of music and advice on pod­cast­ing. He used the music to show how the same basic mes­sage (or melody) can sound very dif­fer­ent, depend­ing on how it’s presen­ted, and talked about how to get that joy and inspir­a­tion into pod­cast­ing. I found it inter­est­ing, even though I don’t listen to pod­casts, with inspir­a­tion for writ­ten blog­ging as well. 

The last pan­el was Altru­ism vs Nar­ciss­ism: what’s in it for the online review­er? with Mon­ica Miller, Kyrsten Jensen, Nicole Christen, and Mar­ina Antunes. I ended up ask­ing quite a few ques­tions of the pan­el to get more details on inter­est­ing items. The advice can be best summed up as: keep your integ­rity. Don’t say you like it if you don’t, but also don’t be too harsh on small inde­pend­ents. In some cases, just don’t post a pub­lic review, but in most cases, say what you really think (while stress­ing it’s your opin­ion and exper­i­ence, not Uni­ver­sal Truth). The ses­sion was lower energy than lots, since it was get­ting a little late in the day, and Kyrsten had almost lost her voice, but I think people found it interesting.

And that was it! North­ern Voice over for anoth­er year.