Well, I have to say it was terrific weekend at Northern Voice.

Once again I was among friends, talking about all of the things we are especially passionate about, and I learned tons. It occurred to me several times throughout the weekend that I like every little thing about Northern Voice; from the fact that it is organized by volunteers (and is now even a non-profit society) to the diverse range of folks attending and topics discussed, and everything in between.

My favorite presentation of the weekend wasn’t about blogging at all, but rather a homage to making art; a visually stunning and clever rant by my good friend Dave Olson entitled “F*ck Stats, Make Art.” A standing ovation followed his talk, and I think I was first on my feet. Rebecca wrote a great follow-up post on his talk.

I’m a tad too busy to document the entire weekend in the same kind of detail that I did last year, but luckily the nature of a blogging conference is that coverage of the event is never hard to come by. Take for instance the 3200+ Flickr photos (and counting) or the 205 (tagged nv08) blog posts from the weekend. Or peek at the Jaiku feed I set up that indexes a lot of the great bloggers that attended.

(Northern Voice collage of Flickr photos by Duane Storey)

Friday morning saw our Video Blogging 101 demo (wiki link) as part of the “Internet Bootcamp,” and it was well received. A properly post produced video of the talk will be forthcoming, but in the meantime here is a short snippet that was shot, edited and published while we were in the room presenting:

I also shot a short video interview with Lee Lefever of the Common Craft show, and soon I’ll get that edited and published here.

As part of my job, I’ll be attending a lot of larger tech conferences this year, the first up being SXSW in Austin in a little over a week, but I suspect that although I will have a lot of fun and learn lots while traveling the “circuit,” I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for Northern Voice.

Big thanks to the organizers for all of their work for putting together an excellent weekend!

(photo of me by Chris Heuer)

On Friday, Feb 22 I will hosting a Video Blogging 101 session at Moosecamp as part of Northern Voice, a two day blogging conference here in Vancouver, BC.

My co-hosts will be Roland Tanglao and Warren Frey, and we hope to cover all of the basics of video blogging; from live streaming, direct to web from cellphone, basic video production and a little bit of everything in between. The presentation is just a half-hour long, but we hope to allow plenty of time for audience questions. Roland has set up a wiki page on the Northern Voice site, where you can add your questions in advance if you wish, and we can add to them to the agenda.

Want to meet the presenters? Check out this short video clip by Roland, which was shot on his Nokia cellphone and uploaded live to the web, via Qik:

As promised, I’ll be sharing more details about my marketing and community building with Strutta.com soon. We are just days away from letting in our first users, and at that time I’ll start to share some notes and welcome your feedback on our community-building plan.