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!’ "
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’m tagging along with Brian today, and he’s doing a panel session at a conference for music librarians (I didn’t even realize there is such a thing as music librarians).
The session is titled “RSS and current awareness for music librarians”. Everyone is getting into weblogs and RSS. It’s basically a brief intro to the wonderful and wacky world of content syndication, a distilled abstract of NorthernVoice, which runs tomorrow, about 3 blocks down Robson street from here…
I realized that after the Pachyderm development team has been talking about the Big Pachyderm 2.0 Demo today, that nobody outside of the project has seen this particular beast. You may have heard something, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a screenshot of the screen editor, which is basically a fancy schmancy web page form, with boxes to enter text, and widgets to select media and links. The particular screen type shown here is called “Variety of Media” - and it can handle images, video, and text (hence the Variety in its name).
I just got an email from my dad telling me about this cool new audio tool he found for making phone calls on the computer for free. Skype, he says, sounds pretty cool.
My dad is turning 70 this year, and really enjoys tinkering with his iMac. He’s got a (now aging) blueberry iMac, and it’s tricked out with extra RAM and MacOSX 10.3.
So, I just added him to my contacts list, and we played around a bit. I called him on Skype Out, and he was pretty impressed. I’m even more impressed that he’s able to find and use these things, and that he actually gets it. I hope I’m still doing new things when I’m 70… :-) (woah - just realized I’m just over half way there.. )
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… :-)
Crap. It’s official. So, I guess we’ll be turning back to our official national sport: lacrosse?
Come on guys… How much money is enough (for either side). It’s a freaking GAME, people. You’re getting/making millions of dollars to play a freaking GAME. Perspective might be a good thing…
If you’re going to be at WebWise 2005 in Washington DC, stop by and check out Larry Johnson demonstrating Pachyderm 2.0. The software isn’t quite done, but you’ll get a good idea of what Pachyderm 2 is, how to use it, and what it produces.
The next chance to see it outside of the Bat Caves will be at Museums and the Web 2005, in Vancouver (April 13-16 2005).
PS. I realize I’m taunting the Demo Gods. Hopefully they are forgiving… We’ve been paying our dues big time on this sucker…
Actually, I upgraded my WP installation when I saw that 1.5 was final (yesterday?) Looks like I borked something while updating, because it was impossible for people using IE on Windows to see my weblog without getting a scary security download warning. Oops. Sorry about that, folks!
(I think) I’ve fixed it now, with a fresh install. (delete all non-config files, upload fresh copy of WP, run upgrade.php)
It’s a really great group of people, from an amazingly varied group of institutions, working on some pretty cool stuff. The Summer Conference is always informative and energizing, and members are on the inside track on initiatives like Pachyderm and the like.
Membership isn’t free, but it won’t break the bank, either. And no, I don’t get commissions… Hmmm… I should check into that! :-)