Northern Voice 2008

It's time to announce the Ask the Expert booth that will be set up on Saturday. (Pardon the wiki dust, we're still scheduling the exact time slots)

We've got a stellar line up of folks both attending the conference in person and dialing in via video conference to answer any questions the attendees may have. We'll be linking questions off the booth page, so all the attendees and watchers from afar can help flesh out answers to any questions people may have.

Whether it's a technical question like "is this CMS right for me?" or something like "Do you have any tips on helping my market my small business?", come by the booth and ask our experts.

Thanks to Voxant for sponsoring this and helping support the Northern Voice conference. They also want to buy you a drink on Friday, so check that link on Upcoming for details.

I look forward to meeting you at Northern Voice.  If you like, please visit my blog.  See you there!

Hey everyone I'm a new blogger in Vancouver, I started it in my class for Kris Krug at Vancouver Film School in our Entertainment Business Management program. Our whole class will be attending the event and interested in the speakers that will be presenting at Northern Voice. Check out my blog would love to share ideas and if you want I can throw you on my Blogroll.

THE BURGAR JOINT

For the past 2 semesters I've been teaching at VFS in the Entertainment Business Management faculty. I teach 'Internet Technologies 101' and 'Internet Technologies 202'.

As a part of our final project for 'Internet Technologies 202' each of the students has been creating and maintaining their own Wordpress.com blog. With Matt coming into town, and so many awesome social media types on hand for Nothern Voice I decided what better way to toss them all into the deep end, than requiring that they all come to Northern Voice to pass my class. *evil grin*

They're a great bunch of film critics, film producers, film and tv agents, network executives, video game producers, tour managers, talent agents, event managers and they've got a bunch of awesome blogs. Check them out, say hi and take their picture at Northern Voice, and /pwease/ send them some linky love. :)

Many of us enjoyed reading the aggregated feeds from the participants of Northern Voice 2007. So with Northern Voice 2008 coming up soon I asked some people in a local chat if there was going to be a similar group feed of the 2008 participants so we can easily check out the posts of the bloggers at the conference before, during and after the conference.

Jordan Behan Director of Community Relations of Strutta has generously offered to do this on Jaiku.

There will be one blog per attendee (if you want to participate), so if you're an attendee of Northern Voice or Moosecamp 2008 and want more people to read your blog, please send an email to Jordan with the name and feed of your blog and he'll add you to the Northern Voice Feed.

Just blogs, no twitters, jaikus, or flickr feeds or we'll all drown from infoglut.

If you have more than one blog you get to pick which one.

Here's the Northern Voice 2008 Channel website and here's the RSS feed. Enjoy.

It happens every year. We receive media enquiries after we sell out the conference. This year we didn't even bother writing a media release because, well, we're all busy and we didn't need one.

That said, we've got at least one speaker appearing in the media this week, and other opportunities may arise. James had the bright idea that we should compile some facts about the conference, as a sort of media cheat sheet. Here they are:

• This is the fourth year for the conference, which started in February, 2005. You can see the sites for previous years here: 2007, 2006, 2005.
• The first two years it was at UBC Robson Square, and last year and this year it's been out at the Forestry building at the UBC main campus.
• In the first year we had about 160 people in attendance, which was a sell-out at the time. We've increased capacity each year, and sold out each year. We'll exceed more than 300 attendees
  this year.
• It's a two day conference, with 'Moose Camp' being Friday's unconference (including an Internet Boot Camp) and Saturday being a more conventional conference.
• Saturday starts with a keynote by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress. Then things break into three tracks, for a total of 20 sessions.

What other facts would the media be desperate to hear about?

Not, uh, like to corporate interests. The conference is sold out, again, for the fourth year in a row. Thanks to everybody who registered.

For the rest of you Johnny-come-latelies, we warned you. We've started a waiting list on the Northern Voice wiki, to which you can add your name and email address.

Update: There are a few slots left for MooseCamp only (i.e. Friday, but not Saturday); register for them while they're still available!

Just wanted to remind everyone that it's 18 days until Northern Voice, and tickets are selling quickly. Really quickly.

I don't want to say anything scary like "We're selling out!"

I mean, it's probably going to happen, and you're going to be all bummed out if you can't get in because you didn't buy tickets in time. All your friends and co-workers have their tickets. And it's really easy to buy tickets right now.

But I don't like to scare people, so, you know, go ahead and make up your own mind. You can wait and see what happens.

(But I wouldn't wait.)

For the third year in a row Northern Voice sponsor Mt Lehman Credit Union has hired awesome Vancouver street artist Basco5 to do posters for the event. Basco5 just posted this draft of the Northern Voice 2008 poster over at Flickr.

What do you think of this years design? Basco5 is taking feedback and we're not quite done with the final artwork yet so if you have some suggestions now would be a good time. I think we're gonna add some pocast-listening critters to the mix somewhere and add 2008 to the Northern Voice type on the top.

Last year the Northern Voice organizing committee also has a lil bit of extra money in our budget and got Basco5 to design and print some awesome streetart stylee stickers for the event. This year our sponsorships are undersold and we don't have the funds but I thought there might be someone out there who would be interested in seeing this happen again this year and coming to the table with some money. If you're interested pls drop me a line... we still have time to pull it together.

As we're in Morocco, Julie and I are taking a back seat on organization for Northern Voice this year. I'm helping out where I can remotely, and one of the things I'm doing is organizing a new feature of the conference for 2008. This time around we're adding a little tech non-profits expo

The plan is to provide about a half-dozen tables on the Saturday where tech-oriented organizations can set up a booth and talk to attendees. We'd ask organizations to agree to run their booths from 9:30am to 1:30pm, though they're welcome to stay longer.

We're specifically looking for technology-oriented non-profits. Good examples would be NetSquared, FreeTheNet.ca, Free Geek Vancouver and Web of Change.

It will be free for the organizations, and they'll get a chance to engage with 300-350 social media and blogging types.

I've sent out some invitations, and we've already got a couple of organizations signed up, but I wanted to put the call out for other suggestions. Do you know an organization that fits the bill?