I must say I was not too sure what to expect when I attended Northern Voice. Would I be surrounded by people geekier than me, or maybe some snobbish high brow folks? I was pleased to see a nice mix of of young and young at heart and from the people I met from all walks of life.

The day started out with the keynote address from Matt Mullenweg and then we went right into the days events. My first foray was in Bringing Social into Blogging by Marc Canter. Very interesting and thought provoking, I am always interested in what can be done with software and what is yet to come. Marc is an excellent presenter and provided a no nonsense look at the the addition of social features to all types of software.

Next on the agenda was Blogging is Dead, Long Live the Blogger presented by Chris Lott and a group of panelists seeded throughout the audience. The discussion went in several directions spurred by comments from both the audience and the panelists. One of the discussions I quite enjoyed was whether we create a different persona on our blogs which some of us use to escape from our lives. I personally do not have a different persona on my Blog, my blog is me, but I can understand why someone might want to have a different character on their web site. Some will be for privacy issues, some to escape their real lives and some possibly to explore different things which in our real lives we would not want to try but still want to experience in some way.

In the afternoon I attended The Other Side of Two Dimensions with Alex Waterhouse-Hayward and Kris Krug. Alex is a fine art photographer who was provided photographs for magazines and newspapers as well as for CBC and many other outlets. The discussion was quite stimulating and the interaction between Alex and Kris was interesting. The final presentation I attended concerned the research project of Jacqueline Schoemaker Holmes about online dating in Vancouver. She took 40 participants (Vancouver Professionites as she called them) professionals and through interviews and shadowing she came up with some info on what it is like to date online, why we use online dating and some of the pitfalls. While I found her presentation to be some what enlightening (it confirmed some of my experiences) I did not completely agree with how she got to her conclusions. She had shadowed 4 of the participants and when asked how she picked the 4 she indicated they basically picked themselves by standing out from the group. They were the most outspoken, had the most charisma and had a high level of confidence. Where I have a problem here is I do not believe this would give an accurate cross section of the 40 participants which in turn would not give a good cross section of online daters. Just my 2 cents.

I think the most interesting session I attended was a postmortem of the Moose Camp. Moose Camp was held on the Friday and is the “unconference” which is self-organizing and also includes an Internet BootCamp for beginners. As I did not attend, it made the postmortem interesting and as well Boris Mann who lead the discussion picked on me to get my take on the discussion from a non participant. Next year I think I need to plan to attend both days as I know I missed out on a lot from Moose Camp/Internet BootCamp.

I had a great time and look forward to next year!