I was looking for Flickr pictures of Northern Voice 2008 using the nv08 tag, and was pleasantly surprised to see both nv08  as well as moosecamp listed as Hot tags over the last week. Great to have been part of something that shows up on Flickr with this much influence!

My full-size screenshot of this is now on Flickr adding to the nv08 tags, too!

I really appreciate Duane Storey’s 1600 Reasons to Love Northern Voice. Made of 1600 images from Northern Voice 2008, it is available via Flickr (where you can see the individual photos that comprised this), as well as Duane’s own site.

This is one more example of the creativity and size of the conference, and kudos for Duane to capture it in this manner!

Technorati Tags: nv08,northernvoice,mosaic

The official opening of Northern Voice 2008 took place this evening at the Tiki Room, in the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver. Good food, good friends, and some wonderful new colleagues made for a wonderful evening. I expect to have a lot of more specific blogging, as well as a health share of liveblogging (come see my presentation on Friday!), over the next few days.

I uploaded the pictures I took to Flickr for all to enjoy and share.

I wonder why airports, which are generally public institutions, still charge for wireless Internet access? I suppose it is still not seen as part of the public good to have such access.

It is nice that British Airways at terminal 7 allows for broadband, but not a person in the terminal was using this “complementary” access. After all, who carries around the wires to plug-in anymore?

Given that I am typing this and will publish it to the Web once I DO have wireless access again (without paying a full day for it though I am only here for less than an hour), I will maintain the original date and time of this post.

Since I leave on Wednesday for Northern Voice in Vancouver, it seems there is no better time than the present to get ready to go. I can pack on Wednesday following my Master Packing List,  a list I created that includes a check-off of every item (suitcase and carry-on) I need to bring with me (or consciously exclude) from any trip I take (I hate forgetting the camera recharger or a pencil with Pos-It flags for whatever it is I am reading).

However, I am now doing the more “silent” items involved in preparing for the trip, those beyond merely gathering everything together and throwing it all in a bag. These are some of the digital items I need to consider, like a check-off list, when I am preparing to travel:

1. Archive and Backup Outlook - This should go without saying (and insofar as it does we tend to forget) that archiving items in Outlook and then backing up the Outlook folders themselves is a good practice to do on a regular basis anyway. This involves more than just automating the processes and then having them run.
2. Backup Personal Folders - The second step, just as critical as the first, is to backup all these files, and indeed all personal folders on the computer to an external storage device. One never knows when something problematic will happen, such as breakage or worse, so being prepared means being backed up. I often let this step go and do more infrequently than I should, but this is something I plan to do later tonight.
3. Remove Old Photos from the Camera - When I take photos, I usually move them to my computer then consider uploading to Flickr if appropriate. However, there are times that I neglect to get these photos off my camera, and they tend to accumulate there. Getting ready for a trip where I am planning to take a lot of photos, I need to free up as much memory as possible (prior to my computer backup, of course!).
4. Charge Bose Headphones - I do not use my Bose headphones very often outside of when I fly, and thus the battery tends to lose its charge. The headphones are useless in an uncharged state, and I really do need to get some sleep on this red-eye so I will make sure they are fully charged.

Is there anything else I am missing?

Technorati Tags: Northern Voice,nv08

Thank you, Darren Barefoot, for creating a one-pager of specifications and historical information about Northern Voice 2008.  

Darren is one of the architects who brought Northern Voice into existence several years ago, and has managed to get me to plan traveling back there, for a second time, all the way from New York.

While billed as Canada’s personal blogging and social media conference, this is a friendly and very informative (in a pleasant networking) environment, where I will be presenting some work on Liveblogging in the conference’s first ever Internet Bootcamp.  

I can’t believe the conference is next week; I am sure in two weeks from now I will be bursting with ideas and next steps and suggestions and resources and new contacts / colleagues / friends. If only all conferences I attend could net so much.

I recently read a post on Andy Wibbels’ blog about shyness, and I find myself often returning to it to the extent that I had to process it in writing. Taken originally from Zen Habits, they are:

1. Introduce Yourself
2. Don’t Feel the Need to Qualify Yourself
3. Ask More, Talk Less
4. Be Generous
5. Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover
6. Remember a Detail
7. Compliment Others
8. Think of Others

Are these factors applicable both online as well as off? Tara on Andy’s site claims they are applicable online, while Zen Habit is somewhat silent about shyness online. While I think shy behavior is shy behavior, I think the medium affects how it is manifest.

Take for example #2 above. When there is a F2F conversation, I find the need to qualify myself and “be as good or better” than others (for the sake of confidence) to be very different than if I am communicating in an online class or discussion board. I feel an awkwardness with people F2F I do not know well when there is silence, but when this occurs online I find it easier to move on (to another website, discussion, research, entertainment, etc.) while not getting so intimidated. Perhaps silence online is expected? Safe? Disengaging?

I wonder if there are not many of the same underlying causes with different ways of expressing them based on the situation? Hmm, I smell a research project here, perhaps one fitting media psychology?

Did I read the last two posts on the Twitter blog correctly?

They stated “You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning,” but instead they should have admitted that their service in the past few days has been intermittent at best.

On the heels of this, they then began today’s post with “We have a stated goal to make Twitter a reliable global communication utility. ” Really? Are they serious?

They have to know their service glitches have been lampooned in the blogosphere, and their credibility has seriously eroded as being a reliable (aka business-able) communication and microblogging (liveblogging?) tool. Many of us have started to rely on Twitter as a communication tool (via Web, BlackBerry, a whole host of applications, etc.), using it from everything from liveblogging to self-marketing and branding.

I know whenever I tell colleagues and friends about Twitter, the platform sounds so silly until I show people how it works and how I use it. Now, I really love Twitter. I like how my Tweets get archived daily on my own blog. How I am able to join a new organization and suddenly begin to have other people interested in reading my daily Twitter musings.

I really hope Twitter becomes more reliable. While this all this costs money, is there enough financing coming in to create and maintain the very reliability we all expect? 

Our long-awaited presentation we are doing at this year’s Northern Voice has finally appeared on their website. As an all-volunteer conference, I really appreciate all the work and efforts the organizers are giving to make this year’s personal blogging and social media conference a success.

My session will be on Friday, February 22, 2008, from 14:00 - 14:30 (2:00-2:30pm) in a new track–Internet Bootcamp. Entitled Liveblogging 101, it is meant to introduce newbies to liveblogging.

As a technologist and qualitative researcher, I am really interested in how liveblogging is an act of involvement and participation. It is not a narrative of the events–that is stenography. It is an interactive co-creation of the event itself from the perspective of an active participant. This in fact summarizes what my blog title, Silence and Voice, is all about. With liveblogging, the silence is ended as participants take up and use their own voices to record the event as they experience it.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. If you want it nice and neat, buy a book.

Technorati Tags: nv08,Northern Voice,liveblogging