Northern Voice Wrap-Up

I spent Friday and Saturday at Northern Voice.

A lot of information went into my brain during that time. Some of it survived.

So what is Northern Voice? The organizers describe it as “Canada’s Blogging Conference”. It’s really about a lot more than just blogging, though.

A more accurate but much more wordy description would be “Canada’s Conference for People Who are Interested in the Power and Potential of the Social Web and it’s Impact on All Aspects of Our Lives.”

Attendee-wise, there was a great, eclectic mixture of folks at the event. This mix included but was not limited to journalists, educators, activists, marketers, entrepreneurs, photographers, artists, writers, uber-geeks, web designers and at least one guy who dressed like a dragon because the people who read his blog voted and decided that he should.

For me, this mixture demonstrates exactly why I get so excited by this stuff—it has the potential to change so many aspects of our daily life.

As far as the sessions went, here are a few of my favourites:

• I’ve never been part of a human bar graph before, but the Meatspace meets the Blogosphere Mash-Up run by the folks at Foo Associates changed that. Fun!

• Nancy White and Lee LeFever moderated an excellent discussion on the big theme of community As the discussion went on Nancy and Lee added keywords to the blackboard, which ended up embodying the current state of online community—very messy and very interesting.
  
  I noticed a fundamental divide in this session—and other sessions as well—that boils down to differing opinions about the fundamentals of human nature. Is the social web a force of good or will the spammers and flamers inevitably ruin it all?
  
  Along these lines there was a hilarious moment when someone made this deadpan comment to the group: “I just wanted to mention that I have some low cost Cialis and Viagra if anyone is interested.”
  

• The panel session on social software and learning laid out a compelling vision of the educational environment my kids will hopefully have in store for them—bottom up instead of top down, active instead of passive. Great to see so many smart folks giving this such careful thought.

• Dave Olson’s session on podcasting was very smart and very funny. I got a kick out of his Bob Dylan-inspired “paper point” presentation and his advice was straightforward and useful.

• Nancy White’s solo session on Saturday was a thoughtful look at some of the tensions at the heart of life on the social web. Nancy’s enthusiasm is contagious and she managed to shed a lot of light on the complex interplay between personal and collective experience. Bravo Nancy!

So there you go. It was fun. It was exhausting. I’m looking forward to next year. Big thanks are due to all of the organizers. So . . . thanks.

Were you there too?

What did you think?

Leave me a comment or a link and let me know.

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