Northern Voice, Day 1: Wow!

Mac OSX on a ThinkPad at North­ern Voice

The first day of North­ern Voice is called Moose Camp. I’m not exactly sure why it’s called Moose Camp, but it has some­thing to do with Foo Camp and Bar Camp, the first of which was an attendee-powered con­fer­ence by “Friends Of O’Reilly” (O’Reilly is the Devel­oper Book Pub­lisher and gen­eral cen­tre of much of Web 2.0 information…and per­haps some of the hype).

The day started early, at around 8:00 AM, where I descended into the com­plex of rooms under­ground the cen­tre of down­town. It’s really a shame that I spent a good deal of the day indoors under­ground, because there wasn’t a cloud in the sky today. As I waited to reg­is­ter, I met the bene­fac­tor of my ticket, Gene Blishen, who rep­re­sents the Mount Lehman Credit Union. I link to them here not only because they spon­sored the event, and also gave me the chance to attend, but also because I’m extremely impressed with them. They’re a small busi­ness in an incred­i­bly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket (Credit Unions in Van­cou­ver are dom­i­nated by big names like VanCity), who com­petes by being both inno­v­a­tive tech­no­log­i­cally, and mak­ing an effort to know each of their cus­tomers. Most of the other spon­sors of the event were what you’d expect, some soft­ware com­pa­nies like Bryght, the domain reg­istry Webnames.ca, who I share office space with, Sun Microsys­tems, and so on. With the excep­tion of Rain­coast Books, Mount Lehman was the only local non-tech busi­ness to real­ize how impor­tant blog­ging is. I’m sure a lot of this is due to Gene, but I’m glad to see a banker with vision, all the same. George Bai­ley would be proud.

The ses­sions started promptly at 9 AM. They were put together quickly, in ad-hoc fash­ion. There were a few last minute changes, but for the most part the board of hand­writ­ten ses­sion names on 5-by-8 cards came pretty close to what I had read online in the past week. I attended a ses­sion on sxore, the iden­tity pro­to­col that would allow par­tic­i­pat­ing web sites and blogs to know who you are (and let you post com­ments) with­out you hav­ing to sign in each time (your cre­den­tials would sit on a server you des­ig­nate as your home­site). It would also make post­ing eas­ier, and allow sites to cut down on com­ment SPAM. It looks inter­est­ing, but time will tell whether it’s suc­cess­ful, since many sites will have to adopt their pro­to­col. Then, I saw an absolutely mind-blowing demon­stra­tion of Now­Pub­lic, a citizen-powered news­pa­per that is really Journalism’s answer to Wikipedia (and per­haps could become almost as pow­er­ful a force). It’s Vancouver-based but Inter­na­tional in reach, and it also has some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing ways of point­ing to con­tent with a sophis­ti­cated ‘wrap­per’ that neatly han­dles some of the rights issues by auto­mat­i­cally build­ing in links back to the orig­i­nal con­tent, like this photo of the North­ern Voice Event:

I loved how Michael Tip­pett (who shares the name of one of my favourite British Com­posers of the 20^th cen­tury), described some of his con­trib­u­tors as ‘Acci­den­tal Jour­nal­ists’. The next ses­sion was pretty free-form, and led by Mark Hamil­ton (not sure of where he’s teach­ing, but he was clearly an aca­d­e­mic). The topic was Jour­nal­ism, and how blog­ging has changed the media land­scape for all of us. I had to admit that I am not as opti­mistic about the wis­dom of the masses as he seemed to be, and I down­right dis­agreed with his asser­tion that these days are the best for mass media deliv­ery choices for human­ity as well as alter­nate media. Hav­ing escaped the inex­orable con­sol­i­da­tion of News net­works and papers in the US into Cor­po­rate sur­ro­gates, I would def­i­nitely not think of the 21^st cen­tury as start­ing out with a robust and coura­geous Mass Media. In any case, it was a lively dis­cus­sion, and a bit of a breather. Not for long. Next came a demo of Ma.gnolia.com, a sort of blend of Flickr’s social aspects with the book­mark­ing of Del.icio.us (hence the sim­i­lar­ity of the name). Then, a ses­sion on videoblog­ging led by Robert San­za­lone, a cor­po­rate trainer who talked about how (among other things), the video iPod has changed the demands of what video you should prob­a­bly pro­duce if you want it viewed by the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence (it turns out the sweet spot is to offer it in Flash video for the web, and Quick­Time movie for iPods and the iTunes podcast/videoblog feeds). The only site he’d found that trans-codes to the right for­mats for you turns out to be an out­fit in France called Dailymotion.com.

Get­ting out of breath? I haven’t even got­ten to lunch yet: I was just get­ting to noon and infor­ma­tion over­load was the order of the day.

The after­noon included a ses­sion on build­ing Com­mu­nity with blog­ging. My favourite term from that ses­sion was a name for peo­ple you first meet online and then later con­nect with in-person: an e-quaintance. What a great neol­o­gism! Pho­tog­ra­pher Kris Krug tried to hit some of the more inter­est­ing top­ics on dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy (although he spent a long time curi­ously enough talk­ing about shoot­ing with plain old film, and then hav­ing it processed with the ‘wrong’ chem­i­cals to pro­duce star­tling effects — I’d seen some of his pho­tos on exhi­bi­tion at The Wicked Cafe and it was great to find out how he achieved those wild por­traits. There was some use­ful infor­ma­tion on depth-of-field, as well as some other tips. Then I saw yet another amaz­ing demo of an online data­base that any­body can use (not just geeks) called Dab­ble DB. It will have so many use­ful appli­ca­tions and looks so cool that I can’t wait for it to go live. Then there was a ses­sion on ‘Lead­er­ship Hacks’ with the founder and CEO of Tech­no­rati, David Sifry.

Finally (and boy, am I out of breath), there was a demo of the lat­est beta (only 48 hours old) of Win­dows Vista. I’m sad to say that it looked clunky and entirely deriv­a­tive of nearly every fea­ture of Mac OSX, (which many peo­ple have already pointed out). I was also dis­ap­pointed to see that much of the ani­ma­tion or ‘eye candy’ was not really thought through. When you close win­dows, they always fade out, instead of, per­haps, zoom­ing down to where they appeared from, which would pro­vide more use­ful infor­ma­tion. I hope that there will be more changed and added, but at this point, it’s no great leap for­ward. The ulti­mate irony is that when one of the pre­sen­ters for that ses­sion men­tioned at the end that he had suc­cess­fully installed the new Mac OSX for Intel on his IBM Thinkpad and started it up, the room went wild and cam­eras appeared from all sides to shoot this.
In the evening, I walked with many of the other atten­dees to Stan­ley Park, where we drank hot choco­late and cof­fee and ate bar­be­cued sausages (and Tim Hor­tons donuts) while watch­ing the pink sky– sun­set was already mostly over. A great end to a day full of intel­lec­tual stim­u­la­tion. I haven’t seen this much cool stuff in a long time. Hard to believe that tomor­row is the real, offi­cial part of the con­fer­ence. My brain is going to need some extra RAM.