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OK. The number of Northern Voice posts on my blog today is just silly. I’ll just be editing this post to manage that…

Tim Bray’s keynote was excellent. He’s such a good speaker, and the session was interesting to everyone here. podcast link

Robert Scoble’s keynote was ok. Less interesting, than Tim (to me), but still interesting. He talked about his perceived role inside Microsoft as the listener-of-weblogs. Dave Winer tried to phone him during the keynote, and got dissed pretty quicky (Mark Canter tried to get Scoble to answer the call in order to find out wtf happened between him and Adam Cury . OK. So Scoble “reads” 1000 rss feeds. Well, he subscribes to them. I still have doubts that he actually reads them in a meaningful way. (update: Robert commented on this post – he actually does read his feeds!) If he does, then he can’t have time for literally anything else. I was surprised and impressed about how candid he was about non-MS products. He was talking about word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, and described Firefox’s incredible adoption. He said “How did people hear about Firefox? It wasn’t from the New York Times. It was when someone said to them ‘Hey, there’s a new browser that can get rid of these nasty pop-ups!’ ”

Tod Maffin’s session on podcasting was good. Notes available here and here.

Stephen Downes is on stage now, talking about how he is against the concept of “the long tail” in weblogs. “Those who trumpet the long tail are in the unique position of not being part of it. Preferential attachment occurs because there is a shortage in something – hence the power law. (shortage of money, time, whatever). Online, the shortage is of attention or time, so we actually need the preferential attachment of “A-list” (and B-list, etc…) to help find what we need. Lots of Downesian intellectual quotes and stuff, but “meaning is use” sorta meaning that tags/folksonomies oversimplify because they don’t encapsulate the real meaning of a piece of content – that there is an additional power law long tail wrt the popularity of tags applied by people that that piece of content. Not sure that I agree with him that this is a problem. I see the power law at play with tag frequency as one of the main benefits… You get both quasi-authoritative (popular) tags, as well as quirky and personalized (less popular tags).

Interesting discourse between Marc Canter and Stephen on the long tail. I think I’m in Marc’s camp on this one. Tags are what you make of them. The long tail is a Good Thing. We just need to figure out a way to navigate and mine it.

(aside: it was pretty cool that Marc’s family was at the conference, with his daughters freely roaming the sessions, and hopping up into daddy’s lap during his panel session)

Cool. Just found a SubEthaEdit shared document for notes… (provide link to Richard’s and Cyprian’s copies of the notes when they are posted…)

Blogging in Academia (Stephen Downes, Laura Trippi, Seb. Paquette, and Bryan Alexander).

OK.. The conference has been running for only a couple hours, and there are already 150+ photos on Flickr! (including evidence that I am here)

Holy pervasive network, and non-stop publishing of content…

Tim Bray just finished his keynote. It was a good overview of blogging, some do’s and dont’s. What I found even more interesting (and Tim was quite intersting) was the crowd. The room was full – standing room only! 220+ people. There were about 20 people in the crowd who don’t blog (but are curious). There was even one person who hadn’t heard of “Sun Microsystems” – “Is that related to the newspaper?” Quite a different group than I’m used to at conferences, but it’s absolutely amazing to see the diffusion of blogging. Robert Scoble just got set up. I’ll pay attention now…

I crashed the Northern Voice pre-conference blogger’s lunch at The Fish House in Stanley Park today. That was pretty cool. Met a whole bunch of people that I only knew online before, and met many more new folks. I was pretty much blown away by the turnout. Brian says there are over 200 people registered in the conference tomorrow. Not bad for something that began as a locals-only blogging-awareness festival!

The conversation over lunch was great. Looking forward to the sessions tomorrow!

I’m tagging along with Brian today, and he’s doing a panel session at a conference for music librarians (I didn’t even realize there is such a thing as music librarians).

The session is titled “RSS and current awareness for music librarians”. Everyone is getting into weblogs and RSS. It’s basically a brief intro to the wonderful and wacky world of content syndication, a distilled abstract of NorthernVoice, which runs tomorrow, about 3 blocks down Robson street from here…

I realized that after the Pachyderm development team has been talking about the Big Pachyderm 2.0 Demo today, that nobody outside of the project has seen this particular beast. You may have heard something, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a screenshot of the screen editor, which is basically a fancy schmancy web page form, with boxes to enter text, and widgets to select media and links. The particular screen type shown here is called “Variety of Media” – and it can handle images, video, and text (hence the Variety in its name).

I’ll follow up next week with some other screenshots, and perhaps a link to some preliminary output from the publishing process.

I just got an email from my dad telling me about this cool new audio tool he found for making phone calls on the computer for free. Skype, he says, sounds pretty cool.

My dad is turning 70 this year, and really enjoys tinkering with his iMac. He’s got a (now aging) blueberry iMac, and it’s tricked out with extra RAM and MacOSX 10.3.

And he’s finding stuff like Skype.

So, I just added him to my contacts list, and we played around a bit. I called him on Skype Out, and he was pretty impressed. I’m even more impressed that he’s able to find and use these things, and that he actually gets it. I hope I’m still doing new things when I’m 70… (woah – just realized I’m just over half way there.. )

I told him about how we’ve been using Skype for the Pachyderm project, and he was impressed that it worked so well. He’s planning to use it to keep in touch with my brother Kevin (in Manila), and some family in Vancouver. At 2 cents per minute, it’s a heck of a deal…

I’m heading to Vancouver a day early for Northern Voice. Planning on hanging around Vancouver a bit, maybe take in the BlogWalk, and relax with Brian (D.J. Wiki) Lamb. Should be fun.

I’ll either be blogging more often, or less. Not sure… Someone is likely to be blogging the conference, though…

Crap. It’s official. So, I guess we’ll be turning back to our official national sport: lacrosse?

Come on guys… How much money is enough (for either side). It’s a freaking GAME, people. You’re getting/making millions of dollars to play a freaking GAME. Perspective might be a good thing…

If you’re going to be at WebWise 2005 in Washington DC, stop by and check out Larry Johnson demonstrating Pachyderm 2.0. The software isn’t quite done, but you’ll get a good idea of what Pachyderm 2 is, how to use it, and what it produces.

The next chance to see it outside of the Bat Caves will be at Museums and the Web 2005, in Vancouver (April 13-16 2005).

PS. I realize I’m taunting the Demo Gods. Hopefully they are forgiving… We’ve been paying our dues big time on this sucker…

UPDATE: Apparently, the demo went great! Larry did his usual magic, and the Pachyderm 2.0 software didn’t jump at his throat…

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