northern voice

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Drawing in situ

Northern Voice: Rachel Smith on graphic recording on the iPad

Graphic recording has long held a certain fascination for me: the idea of capturing the ideas and emotions of a speech, workshop or meeting on paper, as the event progresses. (Nancy White's graphic record of my Northern Voice keynote last year remains one of my happiest public speaking experiences.)

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Trade you a Pikachu for that Hawaiian Bobtail Squid

Northern Voice: David Ng on crowdsourcing a trading-card game to teach biodiversity

David Ng's talk on Phylo - a trading-card game inspired by the study showing kids can identify more Pokémon characters than actual local species - rocked the house, not least because he had us do Chewbacca impersonations.

My notes from David Ng

 

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A touch of mystery

Bryan Alexander at Northern Voice on mystery, bees and bad PowerPoint

Is there such a thing as too much clarity?

Teh funny

Rob Cottingham delivers a keynote address at Northern Voice, Vancouver, Canada - March 21, 2009

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Problem children

David Eaves on coping with difficult comments

Shouting and spitting

Some blog comments are easy to deal with. They praise you to the heavens, share a related story or gently offer a different perspective... that is, they're a positive part of the conversation. You thank, you respond (or they're comment spam, in which case you report them to Mollom or Akismet and then delete) and the circle of life continues.

But other comments are hard. They get your back up. They seem to question not just your argument but your integrity. The more you read them, the clearer it becomes that they were written by evil, evil people. And with your fight-or-flight mechanism firmly in gear, you write a blistering reply...

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"Teh Funny": watch it again for the first time

Rob's Northern Voice keynote now available online

Nancy White captures Teh Funny

Video genius Bruce Sharpe has just posted the video of my keynote from Feb. 21 at the Northern Voice blogging conference in Vancouver. It's my look at what makes the world of social media so damn funny. You'll laugh, you'll cry... and maybe you'll comment on it.

Graphic by Nancy White

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Session Picks for Northern Voice 2009

February in Vancouver means that the Vancouver blogging event of the year, Northern Voice, is just around the corner, happening on Friday, February 20 and Saturday, February 21st at the UBC Forestry Sciences Centre.

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Northern Voice: speaker submission deadline is now Monday, Dec. 22

Northern Voice 2009The invariably astounding Northern Voice blogging/social media conference is happening February 20-21 here in sunny Vancouver... and they're looking for great presentations.

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Northern Voice 2009: call for speakers

Northern Voice, the two-day social media and personal blogging conference, is gearing up for 2009 in Vancouver. And first on the agenda is a call for speakers:

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Toonblogging Northern Voice, day 1

Friday at Northern Voice is the unconference day, a self-organizing but surprisingly unchaotic event.

The turnout is impressive, and I miss getting a seat for the first session... which is cool. There are plenty of corridor conversations to be had... so many, in fact, that I miss the second session.

So I'm hell-bent on making the third session, which turns out to be a well-run discussion on multilingual blogs and web sites.

(participant raising hand) By 'multilingual', I thought you mean PHP and Python.

Session leader Jim DeLaHunt walks us through a conversation that, sadly, lasts only half an hour. We've only scratched the surface, but it's enough to make me want to explore further. I'm especially intrigued by the mechanics sites use for determining what language to present to a particular user:

How multilingual web sites work: 1) Server asks browser what language it prefers. 2) Browser says 'French'. 3) Server says 'Sorry, I don't speak French.

The early afternoon is PhotoCamp. Funny thing how it seems Northern Voice has always had a huge photography component. I've never seen so many digital SLRs in one place. It nearly overwhelmed the presenters...

(presenter behind a mountain of photographic and computer equipment) ...And if you could actually see the presentation screen, you'd see a pretty picture.

Miranda Lievers warns us about how strong overhead sunlight can cause a subject's eye sockets to be in dark shadows, and describes the condition evocatively as "raccoon eyes."

(a raccoon speaks) Actually, yer gonna get that effect no matter how I'm lit.

More than one speaker has a Facebook status update notification pop up while they're presenting... including one by a friend whose status line indicates they're watching the presentation.

(presenter in front of screen; notification appears saying 'Your wife has left you')

The last session I hit is Megan Cole's Social Media Mecca - a long-overdue conversation about collaboration and community among social media consultants in the Vancouver area. Good on her for bringing it up; I only wish there'd been another two hours to keep the discussion going.

Social Signal on...

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