Getting Ready for Northern Voice

I can hard­ly believe my good for­tune, but I’ve been offered a tick­et by a sup­port­ing ven­dor to North­ern Voice, a fas­ci­nat­ing “com­mu­ni­ty-based blog­ging and per­son­al pub­lish­ing con­fer­ence” right here in down­town Van­cou­ver.

It’ll take place for 2 days, this Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, pret­ty much all day at the UBC down­town cam­pus (under­ground, just oppo­site the Muse­um of Art, right in the cen­tre of down­town). I’ve got­ten sup­port from work so that I can spend the day there on Fri­day. Ses­sions run the gamut from inte­grat­ing the new iden­ti­ty sys­tem, sxore, pod­cast­ing and videoblog­ging, AJAX for geeks and non-geeks to Struc­tured Blog­ging and Micro­for­mats. If none of these terms ring a bell, don’t wor­ry. Some of this stuff is pret­ty cut­ting edge. There’ll also be some ses­sions on Sat­ur­day on The Chang­ing Face of Jour­nal­ism, and my favourite title for a ses­sion: “So They’re Threat­en­ing to Sue: Blogs and the Law”, fea­tur­ing the con­fer­ence’s founder and orga­niz­er, Dar­ren Bare­foot. I met Dar­ren briefly when I attend­ed the first blog­ger’s Meet­up a few months ago (although those days some­times feel like they’re in the dis­tant past). The con­fer­ence is in its sec­ond year. I like the His­to­ry Page on their site, though. It reads sim­ply: “It’s fun and pre­ten­tious to have a his­to­ry page for your sec­ond year.” I’m thrilled to be part of what may be becom­ing a major event in Van­cou­ver, and the blo­gos­phere (what­ev­er that is any­way).