This made my day:

But, the more I attend Northern Voice, the more I realize the magic is in who you break bread with.

Last week, I had dinner with Robin, Jeffrey, and this wonderful new friend and worldwide wiki expert- Stewart Mader. We’re at Moxies on Robson, finish ordering, someone brings up Seinfeld, and then the fun really begins…

Thanks Arjun! I look forward to breaking bread again with you soon…

Duane Storey created this amazing mosaic of the Northern Voice Moose using 1600 photos from the conference this past weekend. It’s absolutely gorgeous and yet another reason to love this conference!

I’ve found myself telling people over and over that this is the best conference I go to all year – It’s just filled with good ideas and remarkable people that you want to spend as much time with as possible, like Robin Yap, Jeffrey Keefer, and Arjun Singh to name just a few. Robin has a great post about the Northern Voice “feeling of belonging that transcends other conferences.”

Click the picture to see a huge version on Duane’s site (~9MB).

James Sherrett is leading a session at Northern Voice 2008 on Is advertising killing blogging?:

…we’ll explore how bloggers deal with commercial interests in their personal spaces. My hope is we all get a chance to talk about how we negotiate the personal and the commercial, and what works for each of us.

He’s asked the audience whether or not they have ads on their blogs, and the reasons why: [Read more]

10:13AM We’re in a free market, and in a free market the best solutions win.
(Standing Applause)

10:11AM I could spend these 45 minute talking about the social graph but honestly it doesn’t matter in 2 years. What matters is discussing the underlying architecture, and working to improve it.

What if there was a wiki for every bill, and it could be edited by citizens before becoming law?

10:09AM Code isn’t the most needed thing with most software. The problems with most software – design, branding, color, usability. Most enterprise software suffers immensely from these problems.

10:08AM Matt says he didn’t know how to code when he started WordPress, but he learned.

10:07AM “Ask not what your software can do for you”

10:02AM Social Objects – people congregating around social objects: photos, tags, slideshare because they are more useful than things like friend requests.

9:56AM Exhortation #3: Kill the megabrands. The age of portals is over.

9:52AM Exhortation #2: We have to respect other people’s time.

• Ex #1: johnchow.com – he
  showed this blog as an example of a cluttered interface where it’s hard to find the posts.
• Ex. #2: “a once popular internet company”

9:51AM Facebook’s largest strategic error to date: rules too lose for apps has created a mess of spam (like hot potato requests and zombies)

9:47AM Wikipedia – Jan ‘08: 2.1 Million articles. WordPress blogs – creating equivalent of 2 Wikipedias a month.

9:45AM Exhortation #1: Reduce Friction – we need invisible software

9:43AM Form dictates writing – ex. Prologue theme. It mimics twitter, so people write short posts, as they would with twitter.

9:41AM 4. Validation: comments matter a lot to bloggers. It’s how they know they have readers, and interact with their community.

9:39AM 3. Public: Systems that default to being open end up being most successful.

9:37AM 2. Handling Spam: Spammers are the online version of terrorists.

9:34AM 1. Expression: people want their blogs to represent themselves. Presentation tab in WordPress is one of the most important things about it. People can choose or create a theme that makes their online presence their own.

9:33AM 5 years: 7,226,049 downloads. Let’s look at the 4 things most important to blogger:

9:32AM WordPress: way back in 2003 WordPress started as a fork of b2. Able to do this b/c b2 was open source.

9:30AM Blogging and Social Media: Where do we go from here? Almost a decade into blogging, and we’re just at the cusp of where this is all going.

9:29AM Boris introduces Matt Mullenweg!

9:26AM Today’s color is Brown!

9:25AM Boris Mann: Northern Voice is now a registered society in BC! Part of this year’s conference registration fee helped cover expenses for this. Congrats to the organizers – an excellent milestone!

While I was presenting Wiki 101, Mhairi Petrovic and Jeffrey Keefer liveblogged the session. Mhairi blogged 7 tips for company wikis – more information on these from 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

Thanks Robin for taking some great candids while I presented!

Update: Mark Cannon blogged about the session over at BC Brit.

David Orchard just led this session, which was very well attended! The discussion focused largely on wikis in the enterprise, and how to successfully grow use.

I just created a page for the session on the NV08 Wiki: Enterprise Social

Share your wiki adoption tips! Even if you’re not here at Northern Voice, share some – people will still benefit from them, and I’m sure they’ll appreciate it!

Northern Voice 2008 starts today with MooseCamp, an unconference with spontaneous, self-organized sessions. MooseCamp also includes Internet Bootcamp for those that want a quick primer on blogging, wikis, podcasting, videoblogging, liveblogging, traffic/statistics, and tagging.

At 1:30, I’ll lead the Wiki 101 session of Internet Bootcamp. We’ll talk about several of the topics covered so far in 21 Days of Wiki Adoption, and a few that are yet to come. So if you’re here you’ll get a sneak peek! Otherwise, keep watching the blog for new videos all next week.

Some quick facts about the conference (from Darren Barefoot):

• 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(blog), founder of WordPress. Then things break into three tracks, for a total of 20 sessions.