I had a total blast at Northern Voice 2005. It was probably the most laid-back-yet-productive conferences I’ve been to. It was structured, but not corporate. Loose, but not chaotic. It had a very strong feeling of community – a grassroots “feel” to it, even though many of the “big names” of the blogosphere were there. It was a total community event, and I met so many people from such a wide variety of backgrounds – a real eye opener.
The conference, and especially hanging out at Casa del Lamb the night before, was one of the highlights of the year for me.
It looks like it’s going to be an even bigger/better (but not too big – it’s still at Robson, so it can’t grow much bigger – yay!) event this year, with a pre-conference “Moose Camp” hands-on event. They also realized what a hot commodity the “Bloggable” t-shirt is, and are making them available (for a fee) to everyone. (I’ve worn mine so much that people are likely sick of seeing it 🙂 It’s been to every conference I’ve gone to, as well…)
I’ve got no idea if I’ll be able to make it to Northern Voice 2006, but if there is any way I can swing it, I’ll be there! I might even try to convince some other Learning Commons folks to make the trip…
As for the issue of the “conference tag” – some software chokes on spaces in tags, so I’d vote for “nv06” and/or “northernvoice2006” – both of which are applied to this post.
I had a total blast at Northern Voice 2005. It was probably the most laid-back-yet-productive conferences I’ve been to. It was structured, but not corporate. Loose, but not chaotic. It had a very strong feeling of community – a grassroots “feel” to it, even though many of the “big names” of the blogosphere were there. It was a total community event, and I met so many people from such a wide variety of backgrounds – a real eye opener.
The conference, and especially hanging out at Casa del Lamb the night before, was one of the highlights of the year for me.
It looks like it’s going to be an even bigger/better (but not too big – it’s still at Robson, so it can’t grow much bigger – yay!) event this year, with a pre-conference “Moose Camp” hands-on event. They also realized what a hot commodity the “Bloggable” t-shirt is, and are making them available (for a fee) to everyone. (I’ve worn mine so much that people are likely sick of seeing it 🙂 It’s been to every conference I’ve gone to, as well…)
I’ve got no idea if I’ll be able to make it to Northern Voice 2006, but if there is any way I can swing it, I’ll be there! I might even try to convince some other Learning Commons folks to make the trip…
As for the issue of the “conference tag” – some software chokes on spaces in tags, so I’d vote for “nv06” and/or “northernvoice2006” – both of which are applied to this post.
UPDATE: Since there seeems to be some serious interest in this topic, I’ve started a wiki page to compare the packages.
I’m starting to toss some more ideas around for a proposal to kickstart a weblogs@ucalgary.ca project. Ideally, the system would be able to integrate via LDAP to the university’s authentication system, so people wouldn’t have Yet Another Login to remember. It should also scale to thousands of weblogs.
There are several software candidates I’d like to test a bit more before moving forward: (in no particular order)
- Roller Weblogger (used by Sun for their enterprise weblogs)
- Drupal. It’s good,
but I absolutely hate the way it publishes its urls. They are absolutely meaningless, exposing primary keys right in the URL. Try reading one of these URLs over the phone, or remembering one… and it’s relatively straightforward to expose proper, meaningful URLs.
- Bryght – based on Drupal, but nicer. Same URL issue, though
- WordPress MU: MultiUser. I really like it, and it appears to be LDAP-able, but it’s acting up on my laptop for some reason.
- MovableType Also nice. Not a huge fan of having to generate every entry as a bunch of static files, though…
- Blosjom (bundled with MacOSX 10.4 Server)
- Blosxom (lightweight perl system) (ISP Hosting plugin)
- others?
And no, there isn’t an existing weblogs@ucalgary.ca project (what’s up with that?), and I’m not heading one up (but am willing to do so if need be). I just want to get my shit together so I can put an informed proposal together when I get the time.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time now (even tried to provide some services on the Learning Commons webserver, but that never took off for anyone but myself 🙂 ). It was pretty much sparked into the forefront by the NorthernVoice conference, and the Academic Weblogs session in particular.
UPDATE: I’ve set up a test install of Drupal 4.5 to try it out. It seems pretty impressive, but I may decide to turn off some of the bells and whistles so noobs don’t get too freaked out…
UPDATE: Since there seeems to be some serious interest in this topic, I’ve started a wiki page to compare the packages.
I’m starting to toss some more ideas around for a proposal to kickstart a weblogs@ucalgary.ca project. Ideally, the system would be able to integrate via LDAP to the university’s authentication system, so people wouldn’t have Yet Another Login to remember. It should also scale to thousands of weblogs.
There are several software candidates I’d like to test a bit more before moving forward: (in no particular order)
- Roller Weblogger (used by Sun for their enterprise weblogs)
- Drupal. It’s good,
but I absolutely hate the way it publishes its urls. They are absolutely meaningless, exposing primary keys right in the URL. Try reading one of these URLs over the phone, or remembering one… and it’s relatively straightforward to expose proper, meaningful URLs.
- Bryght – based on Drupal, but nicer. Same URL issue, though
- WordPress MU: MultiUser. I really like it, and it appears to be LDAP-able, but it’s acting up on my laptop for some reason.
- MovableType Also nice. Not a huge fan of having to generate every entry as a bunch of static files, though…
- Blosjom (bundled with MacOSX 10.4 Server)
- Blosxom (lightweight perl system) (ISP Hosting plugin)
- others?
And no, there isn’t an existing weblogs@ucalgary.ca project (what’s up with that?), and I’m not heading one up (but am willing to do so if need be). I just want to get my shit together so I can put an informed proposal together when I get the time.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time now (even tried to provide some services on the Learning Commons webserver, but that never took off for anyone but myself 🙂 ). It was pretty much sparked into the forefront by the NorthernVoice conference, and the Academic Weblogs session in particular.
UPDATE: I’ve set up a test install of Drupal 4.5 to try it out. It seems pretty impressive, but I may decide to turn off some of the bells and whistles so noobs don’t get too freaked out…
OK. The number of Northern Voice posts on my blog today is just silly. I’ll just be editing this post to manage that…
Tim Bray’s keynote was excellent. He’s such a good speaker, and the session was interesting to everyone here. podcast link
Robert Scoble‘s keynote was ok. Less interesting, than Tim (to me), but still interesting. He talked about his perceived role inside Microsoft as the listener-of-weblogs. Dave Winer tried to phone him during the keynote, and got dissed pretty quicky (Mark Canter tried to get Scoble to answer the call in order to find out wtf happened between him and Adam Cury :-). OK. So Scoble “reads” 1000 rss feeds. Well, he subscribes to them. I still have doubts that he actually reads them in a meaningful way. (update: Robert commented on this post – he actually does read his feeds!) If he does, then he can’t have time for literally anything else. I was surprised and impressed about how candid he was about non-MS products. He was talking about word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, and described Firefox’s incredible adoption. He said “How did people hear about Firefox? It wasn’t from the New York Times. It was when someone said to them ‘Hey, there’s a new browser that can get rid of these nasty pop-ups!’ ”
Tod Maffin’s session on podcasting was good. Notes available here and here.
Stephen Downes is on stage now, talking about how he is against the concept of “the long tail” in weblogs. “Those who trumpet the long tail are in the unique position of not being part of it. Preferential attachment occurs because there is a shortage in something – hence the power law. (shortage of money, time, whatever). Online, the shortage is of attention or time, so we actually need the preferential attachment of “A-list” (and B-list, etc…) to help find what we need. Lots of Downesian intellectual quotes and stuff, but “meaning is use” sorta meaning that tags/folksonomies oversimplify because they don’t encapsulate the real meaning of a piece of content – that there is an additional power law long tail wrt the popularity of tags applied by people that that piece of content. Not sure that I agree with him that this is a problem. I see the power law at play with tag frequency as one of the main benefits… You get both quasi-authoritative (popular) tags, as well as quirky and personalized (less popular tags).
Interesting discourse between Marc Canter and Stephen on the long tail. I think I’m in Marc’s camp on this one. Tags are what you make of them. The long tail is a Good Thing. We just need to figure out a way to navigate and mine it.
(aside: it was pretty cool that Marc’s family was at the conference, with his daughters freely roaming the sessions, and hopping up into daddy’s lap during his panel session)
Cool. Just found a SubEthaEdit shared document for notes… (provide link to Richard’s and Cyprian’s copies of the notes when they are posted…)
Blogging in Academia (Stephen Downes, Laura Trippi, Seb. Paquette, and Bryan Alexander).
OK. The number of Northern Voice posts on my blog today is just silly. I’ll just be editing this post to manage that…
Tim Bray’s keynote was excellent. He’s such a good speaker, and the session was interesting to everyone here. podcast link
Robert Scoble‘s keynote was ok. Less interesting, than Tim (to me), but still interesting. He talked about his perceived role inside Microsoft as the listener-of-weblogs. Dave Winer tried to phone him during the keynote, and got dissed pretty quicky (Mark Canter tried to get Scoble to answer the call in order to find out wtf happened between him and Adam Cury :-). OK. So Scoble “reads” 1000 rss feeds. Well, he subscribes to them. I still have doubts that he actually reads them in a meaningful way. (update: Robert commented on this post – he actually does read his feeds!) If he does, then he can’t have time for literally anything else. I was surprised and impressed about how candid he was about non-MS products. He was talking about word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, and described Firefox’s incredible adoption. He said “How did people hear about Firefox? It wasn’t from the New York Times. It was when someone said to them ‘Hey, there’s a new browser that can get rid of these nasty pop-ups!’ ”
Tod Maffin’s session on podcasting was good. Notes available here and here.
Stephen Downes is on stage now, talking about how he is against the concept of “the long tail” in weblogs. “Those who trumpet the long tail are in the unique position of not being part of it. Preferential attachment occurs because there is a shortage in something – hence the power law. (shortage of money, time, whatever). Online, the shortage is of attention or time, so we actually need the preferential attachment of “A-list” (and B-list, etc…) to help find what we need. Lots of Downesian intellectual quotes and stuff, but “meaning is use” sorta meaning that tags/folksonomies oversimplify because they don’t encapsulate the real meaning of a piece of content – that there is an additional power law long tail wrt the popularity of tags applied by people that that piece of content. Not sure that I agree with him that this is a problem. I see the power law at play with tag frequency as one of the main benefits… You get both quasi-authoritative (popular) tags, as well as quirky and personalized (less popular tags).
Interesting discourse between Marc Canter and Stephen on the long tail. I think I’m in Marc’s camp on this one. Tags are what you make of them. The long tail is a Good Thing. We just need to figure out a way to navigate and mine it.
(aside: it was pretty cool that Marc’s family was at the conference, with his daughters freely roaming the sessions, and hopping up into daddy’s lap during his panel session)
Cool. Just found a SubEthaEdit shared document for notes… (provide link to Richard’s and Cyprian’s copies of the notes when they are posted…)
Blogging in Academia (Stephen Downes, Laura Trippi, Seb. Paquette, and Bryan Alexander).
OK.. The conference has been running for only a couple hours, and there are already 150+ photos on Flickr! (including evidence that I am here)
Holy pervasive network, and non-stop publishing of content…
OK.. The conference has been running for only a couple hours, and there are already 150+ photos on Flickr! (including evidence that I am here)
Holy pervasive network, and non-stop publishing of content…
Tim Bray just finished his keynote. It was a good overview of blogging, some do’s and dont’s. What I found even more interesting (and Tim was quite intersting) was the crowd. The room was full – standing room only! 220+ people. There were about 20 people in the crowd who don’t blog (but are curious). There was even one person who hadn’t heard of “Sun Microsystems” – “Is that related to the newspaper?” Quite a different group than I’m used to at conferences, but it’s absolutely amazing to see the diffusion of blogging. Robert Scoble just got set up. I’ll pay attention now…
Tim Bray just finished his keynote. It was a good overview of blogging, some do’s and dont’s. What I found even more interesting (and Tim was quite intersting) was the crowd. The room was full – standing room only! 220+ people. There were about 20 people in the crowd who don’t blog (but are curious). There was even one person who hadn’t heard of “Sun Microsystems” – “Is that related to the newspaper?” Quite a different group than I’m used to at conferences, but it’s absolutely amazing to see the diffusion of blogging. Robert Scoble just got set up. I’ll pay attention now…
I crashed the Northern Voice pre-conference blogger’s lunch at The Fish House in Stanley Park today. That was pretty cool. Met a whole bunch of people that I only knew online before, and met many more new folks. I was pretty much blown away by the turnout. Brian says there are over 200 people registered in the conference tomorrow. Not bad for something that began as a locals-only blogging-awareness festival!
The conversation over lunch was great. Looking forward to the sessions tomorrow!
I crashed the Northern Voice pre-conference blogger’s lunch at The Fish House in Stanley Park today. That was pretty cool. Met a whole bunch of people that I only knew online before, and met many more new folks. I was pretty much blown away by the turnout. Brian says there are over 200 people registered in the conference tomorrow. Not bad for something that began as a locals-only blogging-awareness festival!
The conversation over lunch was great. Looking forward to the sessions tomorrow!
I’m heading to Vancouver a day early for Northern Voice. Planning on hanging around Vancouver a bit, maybe take in the BlogWalk, and relax with Brian (D.J. Wiki) Lamb. Should be fun.
I’ll either be blogging more often, or less. Not sure… Someone is likely to be blogging the conference, though… 🙂
I’m heading to Vancouver a day early for Northern Voice. Planning on hanging around Vancouver a bit, maybe take in the BlogWalk, and relax with Brian (D.J. Wiki) Lamb. Should be fun.
I’ll either be blogging more often, or less. Not sure… Someone is likely to be blogging the conference, though… 🙂
Boris Mann just posted link to an iCal Schedule for Speakers at the Northern Voice conference this Saturday. The iCal calendar was compiled by Northwest Noise.
Excellent. I’ve already subscribed to it in iCal, so it will sync onto my iPod calendar next time I drop it into the cradle. Handy way to keep track of the conference schedule…
Thanks, Boris!
Boris Mann just posted link to an iCal Schedule for Speakers at the Northern Voice conference this Saturday. The iCal calendar was compiled by Northwest Noise.
Excellent. I’ve already subscribed to it in iCal, so it will sync onto my iPod calendar next time I drop it into the cradle. Handy way to keep track of the conference schedule…
Thanks, Boris!
