Northern Voice 2009: February 20-21 in Vancouver

Northern Voice 2009

Set the date and mark your calendars. Northern Voice is returning for 2009.

In 2005, the organizers of Canada’s first weblogging conference put on an event that was inexpensive, informal, and accessible to techies and newbies alike. From those humble beginnings Northern Voice has been transformed into… well, actually it’s still cheap, friendly and open to all.

Without question, the event has grown due to the overwhelming community response. It’s added a second self-organizing day known as Moose Camp. We expect a few more attendees this year, in part because our space is larger. But the core values remain the same — we have held the line on costs, we try to make the event family-friendly by offering space for parents to establish cooperative child-minding, and we do the main event on Saturday so non-professionals can attend.

And although it is a weblog conference, the range of topics may involve anything that webloggers are interested in… that is, just about anything. Previous years have had plenty of geekery mixed with panels on how blogging interacts with family life, education, travel, photography, community building and establishing professional profiles. Speakers range from the big names at the top of the Technorati rankings to first-time presenters with a passion to share.

I’m not sure if I will try my hand at presenting this year as last year’s session on Podcasting 101 could have been done much better. Life hasn’t slowed down enough to refine that presentation, but there are things I would certainly do differently if I did find the time to get something worthwhile put together.

Truthfully, it’s hard to teach podcasting in a thirty or sixty minute session, but I wouldn’t mind giving it another shot if the opportunity presented itself. Probably should get another episode of RadioZoom out as well, but The Crazy Canucks are certainly going strong.

I’m looking forward to another year of social media fun. It’ll be interesting to see what everyone is excited about, but Twitter was so two years ago.

Podcasting 101: the blog post

After giving my MooseCamp session at Norther Voice 2008 on Podcasting 101, I learned a lot more about how things should have gone versus how it went.

Northern Voice 2008 by John Biehler
Photo credit: John Biehler on Flickr

There were a variety of factors that caused me to really struggle how you give someone an introduction on podcasting within 30 minutes that doesn’t leave them feeling like a bus just drove by them and smacked them in the face because they were standing so close and didn’t see that rear view mirror sticking out as much as they just saw the bus. I only use that analogy because it almost happened to me a few weeks ago.

Rather than go through the would, should, or could haves, I’m going to make a blog post that hits the same topics, laid out in a method that will allow folks to explore tools of the medium rather than generate buzz words that you’ll forget to Google later. Plus, this will help me develop a better method of being able to do something like this again, if the virtual tomatoes haven’t already been thrown at me.
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