More neat stuff from the northern Voice conference…Kirsten Bole (who is currently sitting next to me) just told me about a site called 10 by 10. The idea behind the site is to show a grid of the hundred most important pictures in the news, based on current headlines. I showed her Newsmap, which takes the latest Google News headlines and turns them into a graphical map. Neat.
Me looking dorky here and here. I met this nice lady over IRC at the previous seminar, and this guy and I had a fine discussion about Alan Moore’s near dietyhood after the first conference. I also met blogerati stars Tod Maffin and ex-Tech TV guy Chris Pirillo this morning.
The last session was about video blogging, which I haven’t as yet gotten involved in. You’d think my background in television would lend itself to video blogging, but in fact it’s the one thing that keeps me from trying vblogs. That’s how bad the taste of the glass teat is, even two years out of the game.
One of the neat things that happened here (a first) is meeting someone on IRC who’s sitting right next to you, which happened at the last seminar. Here and here are her websites.
Right now there’s a panel of people talking about building traffic to your site. So far, it’s all common sense stuff.
Tod Maffin is speaking about the podcasting phenomenon at the Northern Voice blogging conference. I’m thinking about putting a podcast together, though not until I’ve got my ducks in a row in Korea. Anyway, the NYT also ran a story about podcasting today, six months after it became a big deal.
And just to show how immediate all this stuff is, there’s a guy next to me using his iSight camera to capture all this stuff and post the video to audioblog.com, as well as audio on his own site.
So I’ve already found some pictures of myself online, had someone add me as a Flickr contact, and added a couple of RSS feeds. Just to be a total nerd, I fired up BBC World Service’s video feed to add to the shenanigans.
Now this just ain’t right.
Already I’m online and incriminated, as someone took a picture of me outside in the hall sucking down some coffee.
Tim Bray, some Sun Microsystems nabob, is warming up the crowd. I got into the keynote, presumably because four other people overslept. More later.
Currently I’m #4 on the waiting list to get into the Northern Voices blogger conference at UBC Robson. Since I just found out about this shindig yesterday, I don’t feel too bad about sitting and the hallway and diddling around on their free wifi connection, though I will be missing Robert Scoble’s keynote. Scoble is Microsoft’s “blog-guy,” and it would have been interesting to listen to what he has to say, but….ehh.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that this event seems to be pretty Mac-centric. Loads and loads of Powerbooks, so evidently these people are right thinking folk with fine taste in computation.
Gaming magazines are by and large terrible, as eloquently stated here and here.
I don’t really play many videogames anymore, but when I did, I was lucky enough to be able to read “Next Generation” magazine, the onl gaming magazine I’ve ever come across aimed at adult readers. Besides having the balls to give bad reviews, unlike, say, EGM and its ilk, Next Gen was also the only mag to have in depth interviews with execs and game creators from all the major console players and the PC world. Since they appealed to intelligent readers, they inevitably crashed and burned. No videogame magazine I know of has come close to replacing them.