Random Thoughts NV08

Notes to Self:

• Don’t wear thigh highs when you are wearing a skirt with a high slit in it.
• I didn’t hear the word “granular” once at this year’s conference. Last year, every second word was granular.
• I *totally* have to try out all of the 50 Web 2.0 tools for telling a story. Maybe make some cool stuff for my lectures.
• Buy a Mac.

In other news, I decided that both of my cool boots should get the chance to enjoy the NV glory.  As you know, I wore the boots I bought on Christmas Eve on Day #1. Which means that the eBay boots made they blogging conference debut on Day#2…. Phillip kindly took a pic for me, I’ll share that with all y’all once it has been posted.

Northern Voice – Education Session

Hmmm.. just noticed that I had typed this up during the session yesterday, but never got around to posting it. Anyhoo, here’s my notes:

Brian‘s section:

• I don’t have to take notes. Just go here to see all the cool stuff.
• Wondering what the infinity symbol throughout represents. Brian, can you shed some light on that?
• Some good points about using WebCT (and other closed course management sites) – students can’t preview a course to see if they want to take it; students can’t go back to the material (in a course that they paid a lot of money to take) after the course is over; students don’t even have access to their own work in the WebCT site after the course is over.

Next dude’sJim Groom‘s ¹ section:

• have all the students writing their own blog, then make one blog that is an aggregate of the feeds of all the students. That way each student can blog wherever they like. Very cool idea.
• Talking about how easy it is to use WordPress to make a site for students to publish in (rather than just a reverse-chronological-diary type blog): “This is something even a professor can do.” It’s funny ‘cuz it’s true.

¹Didn’t catch his name. I suck.Thanks, Brian, for filling me in on the names!

Northern Voice – How Not To Use PowerPoint

Alan Levine just showed us what Cinderella would be like in PowerPoint. That is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Northern Voice – Day #2

Today started with a keynote address by Matt Mullenweg from WordPress¹. Unfortunately, while I staked out a good seat for the talk, I neglected to stake out one of the 3 electrical outlets in the room and my laptop battery only lasts for 14.3 minutes, so I didn’t get to take notes while the talk was on. I’ll have to check out all of the other blog postings for more comprehensive notes, but here’s a few things from the keynote that stuck in my brain:

• “spammers are equivalent of terrorists for the online world”
• English Wikipedia has 2.1 million entries in total. WordPress users create 4 million pages a month.
• attention is finite – content can grow, but we only have so many hours in a day and that’s not going to increase, so we need to find ways to filter content

Next, I went to a session on advertising on blogs. A really good discussion about the pros and cons of advertising on your blog. One thing that really stuck out to me, which Miss604 is Twittering about, is that this site² that scrapes other people’s content off their blogs and then charges $500 a week for ads on their sites. $500 a week for stolen content. That’s just bullshit.

Then I went to the session with the coolest title of all the session – “Fuck Stats, Make Art.” Totally cool.

After that was lunch, which was good because I was starving. The good news: it was a cool make your own wrap thing where they actually had beans (!), the first time I’ve seen any non-cheese vegetarian protein at the conference. The bad news: the beans were gone before I got there. Well, there were beans at the food table that I didn’t go to, but the one I went to was all out. And by the time I got far up enough in the line up to see that, it was too late to go to the other line-up Boo-urns! =(

And now I’m in There Are 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story… a PowerPoint-free presentation that’s dependent on flaky internet. Looks to be interesting.

¹Not WordPress. WordPress, not WordPress.
²This is who is scraping content. http://www.peoplevancouver.com/ I didn’t want to give them a link.

Live Blogging 101

Now I’m in a “how to live blogging” session. I would live blog it, except I don’t know how to live blog… yet.

Update #1:

Programs for Liveblogging:

• MS Live Writer
• Scirbe Fire (Firefox plugin)
• Cover It Live – I’ve seen this one in use; it’s pretty cool
• Ecto
• Twitter

Note to self – check these all out.

Update #2:

Check out this cool live blog of Live Blogging 101.

Next Up: Photocamp!

I’m about to head to the after lunch session – Photocamp.  Back when I got my digital camera, I specifically got one that would allow me to fiddle with all kinds manual settings, as I was under the delusion that I would spend some time learning what all the settings meant so I could take nicer pics.  And, of course, I rarely use anything other than “auto.”  Here’s hoping that Photocamp will teach me something.

And, in honour of Photocamp, here’s a pretty pic, featuring *my boots*, taken by photographer extraordinare, Duane Storey.   Thanks, Duane.

Moosecamp ’08

Here I am at Northern Voice! I’ve actually been here since 9 a.m., but it’s taken me this long to make my lovely computer connect to the internets. Well, it said it was connected 3 hours ago, but wouldn’t actually let me see any, like, websites. After the fourth person in a row that I asked for help said, “PC? You should just buy a Mac,” I decided to take a coffee break and it appears that the old “turn it off, turn it back on again” computer cure-all worked.

So now that I’m all connected, check out this cool photo of me, taking a photo of my name tag. That was at last night’s Tiki Party – it was at the Waldorf hotel – a place I’ve never heard of that has a super cool Polynesian room. But I digress…. the thing with a name tag at a blogging conference is that you tag yourself, on your name tag. You may remember name tag from last year. Here’s this year’s version:

Also of note, since I’m volunteering again this year, I get to wear a sheriff’s badge.  You know you are jealous!  I’ll post a pic of that later, as I haven’t quite gotten around to taking a pic of that, what with the spending all my time trying to make my wireless work.

What I did take a picture of for all y’all is the building this conference is in.  It’s the Forestry building.  My task as a volunteer this morning was to tape up the signs saying where the rooms are… but the instruction “You can’t tape anything to the wood.”  In the *Forestry* building.  Ya, good times.

OK, I’m going to go grab some lunch.  Free lunch!