MooseCamp 2008

 Conference, Vancouver  1 Response »
Feb 242008
 

Anoth­er nice Fri­day in Feb­ru­ary for Moose­Camp; some­how the Moose­Camp day man­aged to score nice weath­er two years in a row. This year’s Moose­Camp was big­ger than pre­vi­ous years, and I think we’re get­ting to the lim­it of how many people we can take without los­ing some­thing. We also seem to be get­ting a lot more people who are inter­ested more in com­mer­cial aspects of blog­ging and social media than the per­son­al side, so I’m not sure how that’s going to play out in the future either.

I spent much of the morn­ing on the t‑shirt and regis­tra­tion desk until things settled down, then went to the mul­ti­lin­gual ses­sion, mostly since I occa­sion­ally won­der wheth­er (I should try blog­ging in Ger­man as well as Eng­lish. There were quite a few people in the room, but it turned out that only two of us were inter­ested in the sub­ject for a per­son­al blog; every­one else was inter­ested in the sub­ject for a cli­ent, or for their com­pany. Which isn’t bad, and I’m sure the oth­er people in the room were glad to know that sev­er­al oth­ers were inter­ested in the cor­por­ate aspects of the sub­ject, it was just of less interest to me personally. 

Pho­tocamp took the first part of the after­noon; inter­est­ing as always and some decent tips on light­ing, even for the few of us who use little pock­et cam­er­as (there were some ser­i­ously big cam­er­as on show).

I spoke in the last part of the inter­net boot­camp. The talk I’d pre­pared was meant, in good uncon­fer­ence fash­ion, to be reas­on­ably inter­act­ive. James agreed to help out, since he also found the top­ic inter­est­ing: What Next? The idea was to talk to people who’d been blog­ging for a little while and wanted to take their blog to the next level; I was primed with top­ics such as broad­en­ing the focus versus nar­row­ing it, how the tone and style of blogs tend to devel­op, what effect incor­por­at­ing work top­ics often has, mul­tiple blogs versus one blog on mul­tiple top­ics. A few minutes in it became really obvi­ous that people wer­en’t inter­ested in the sub­ject, and when I asked why they were there, almost all were inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out how their com­pany should start blog­ging, or make their com­pany blogs more effect­ive. So in even bet­ter uncon­fer­ence style, I changed the sub­ject and star­ted talk­ing about how Sun had imple­men­ted blog­ging. Most people seemed much hap­pi­er with that sub­ject, and we dis­cussed a lot of related issues. For­tu­nately it was the last ses­sion of the day so the fact we then went over time did­n’t seem to upset too many people. 

Yearly Rethink

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Dec 062007
 

One of the reas­ons I like going to North­ern Voice is that it always gives me lots to think about, in terms of what to write about on my blog, what tech­nic­al tricks to try out, and how to write bet­ter. Oth­er people choose their blo­giversary, or maybe New Year’s Day, but I find North­ern Voice to be bet­ter. One reas­on of course is the num­ber of enthu­si­ast­ic people there talk­ing about blog­ging and social media and how they use them.

All of which is a long way of say­ing that this year I’ll be look­ing for more of that spark, that enthu­si­asm in the speak­er sub­mis­sions. What talks will make me happy to be blog­ging, will give me incent­ive to make my blog bet­ter, will tell me of inter­est­ing things to try? What talks would make me want to start blog­ging, if I wer­en’t already? The dead­line is Monday, Decem­ber 10th, so you don’t have long to pol­ish those ideas (and we can­’t take late sub­mis­sions as we’re select­ing talks that same week and we do need to read them first). For oth­er views on what we’re look­ing for, check out Dar­ren’s post­ing, or Bri­an’s. Bri­an also has some pho­tos of the party spot for the Thursday even­ing as an added incent­ive to go there and read what he has to say. Once you’re ready, sub­mit your idea while it’s fresh and before you forget.

Northern Voice Weekend

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Feb 212007
 

The week­end is going to be full of North­ern Voice, I can just tell. The must-dos for me are the din­ner on the Thursday even­ing (sorry, sold out), the uncon­fer­ence day on the Fri­day (I’ll be going to the ses­sion on iden­tity and pri­vacy of course, and whatever else takes my fancy once I’m there), and mod­er­at­ing a couple of ses­sions on the Sat­urday after­noon (Nancy White and Alex Water­house-Hay­ward and Dar­ren Bare­foot). Some of the ses­sions I’d like to go to clash with oth­ers as is always the case at any half-way decent con­fer­ence, but unlike lots of con­fer­ences this one should be extens­ively pod­cast. Not quite the same as being in a ses­sion, but a good second.

I hope to have more blog­ging energy after this con­fer­ence. Recently I’ve felt like I’ve spent more time on meta-issues than actu­ally blog­ging; I’ve been trawl­ing for break-ins on my site and sift­ing through access logs most days rather than craft­ing prose. With all the pass­words on my site now changed, and the latest WP installed, all I need to get back to writ­ing is a bit of inspir­a­tion. In past years North­ern Voice has sup­plied that; hope­fully this year it will again. 

Moose Deadlines

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Nov 292006
 

The regis­tra­tion is open for North­ern Voice 2007 and the speak­er sub­mis­sions will be clos­ing on Fri­day Decem­ber 1st. We exten­ded the dead­line to let people recov­er from the tor­ren­tial down­pours, record snow­falls, high winds, and assor­ted oth­er draw­backs of Novem­ber in the Pacific North-West. 

And if you want a t‑shirt, you can vote on which col­our it should be as well! Just head over to the sur­vey and let us know.

CfS: NV2007

 Conference, Technology  No Responses »
Oct 232006
 

Enough acronyms for now — the Call for Speak­ers for North­ern­Voice 2007 is open! North­ern Voice is Van­couver­’s blog­ging con­fer­ence, focus­sing on per­son­al blog­ging. This means talks on how to solve some com­pany’s PR prob­lems are not really in scope, though tips on how to run a per­son­al blog when you’re also an exec­ut­ive at a well-known com­pany would be. We’re doing the two-day ver­sion again, where Moose­Camp is an “uncon­fer­ence” on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2007, and the con­fer­ence prop­er is on Sat­urday Feb­ru­ary 24th, 2007.

In pre­vi­ous years we’ve held the con­fer­ence down­town in Van­couver, but we could­n’t get the space we wanted this year. So we’re going out to the UBC main cam­pus, way out west in Van­couver, about as far west as you can go without fall­ing off into the Geor­gia Strait (note, it’s still in Van­couver prop­er, south of the Lions Gate bridge). Cyp­ri­en man­aged to get us space in the Forestry Sci­ences Centre (pho­tos) so we can have all the space we need for talks and the self-organ­ized child­care. I think this will be a fun con­fer­ence, par­tic­u­larly as I’m not plan­ning on being any­where else the week before. Last year I was jet­lagged, hav­ing got back from a trip to Rome the night before, and I still had a good time at the conference.

Oth­er mem­bers of the organ­ising com­mit­tee have blogged it already: Bor­is, Bri­an, Dar­ren, and Kris all have their takes on what’s import­ant about this conference.

At the selec­tion meet­ing I’ll be look­ing for pro­posed talks that cov­er one or more of the groups of people we’ll have in the audi­ence. As a side-note, please don’t just say you can talk about any­thing. That really does­n’t help us fig­ure out who should talk on what — if you have an idea and we think a vari­ant of it would work bet­ter, don’t worry, we won’t be shy in ask­ing you to change focus a bit! I expect we’ll have few­er new­comers to blog­ging, although we will have some of those; to make up for it I expect we’ll have a cer­tain num­ber of people who feel they’ve already said everything that they can say and want to some tips on keep­ing up the excite­ment and interest in what they’re blog­ging. We’ll have some people who want tips on how to incor­por­ate pho­tos, video, or audio bet­ter, and some who still aren’t sure what style sheets are all about. In your speak­er sub­mis­sion, tell us who you’re aim­ing at and what know­ledge they need (or don’t); this will help us fig­ure out how to put everything togeth­er. This is a fun and edu­ca­tion­al con­fer­ence and good speak­ers are part of that, so please put a bit of time into those sub­mis­sions to make it easi­er for us to pick out the good speak­ers! The dead­line is Novem­ber 28th, and this is a real dead­line. Please do use the form and don’t just send us email as we want to make sure we don’t over­look any sug­ges­ted talks, or lose them in some­body’s over-eager spam fil­ter. Oh, and by the way, let us know of talks you’d like to see, even if you don’t want to give them.

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