What an epic weekend! So much going on surrounding the best little conference ever, Northern Voice. As usual, I’ll try to detail my experiences with photos and video I shot:
Things kicked off Thursday at Federico’s Supper Club with the somewhat controversial (due to political sponsorship) opening dinner which was a lot of fun.
It seems this photo of Jenn and Nadia is a little popular with a few folks online.
I’m not sure why…maybe the lighting?
After a fun night out for dinner, it was up bright and early Friday morning for MooseCamp at the beautiful Forestry Sciences Building at UBC.
Hopefully next year a few more people will show up…
For the most part, I used my fisheye lens the whole weekend….what can I say, I love that lens. Here’s a few more images from the weekend:
Tim Bray led an awesome PhotoCamp this year which as always was a great geek out session for the photographers in attendance. The first thing he asked everyone to do was to take a photo of their neighbour in the room. Here’s my shot of Anthony taken with my LensBaby Composer (unfortunately the only time I had it on my camera the whole weekend):
I spent most of yesterday on Granville Island at BarCamp 2008 and it was a blast.
Things actually started off Friday night at WorkSpace for the opening night party and then up bright and early for the actual ‘unconference’ on Saturday.
This year, I helped organize PhotoCamp which is one of the few pre-determined ‘tracks’ (the other being WordCamp). BarCamp is meant to be an adhoc-like conference where the sessions are proposed by whomever shows up on the day, not weeks in advance. Photo (and Word) Camps require a little more prep since it’s not just an open talk but the idea behind all of them is that the participants shape the conversations.
I ended up giving a talk in the morning about jailbreaking the iPhone 3G (why you might want to do this, what’s involved, etc) which was well attended and seems to have been well received. You can get the apps to jailbreak your 3G here as well as to unlock your 1st gen iPhone.
Then I headed to check out the remaining portions of WordCamp and ended up giving a talk (more of an overview) of the FAlbum plugin I use on this site to share my Flickr photos.
PhotoCamp Derek K. Miller started things off by explaining a number of digital photography concepts using his collection of film cameras and referencing his excellent cameraworks series of blog posts on the topic.
Next up was Tris Hussey who discussed some of the online photo editing services like Picnik.
Another session I led was about plastic/toy cameras and Elizabeth showed some of her cameras and photos she took with them along with mine.
Then Cameron Cavers and I talked about lens adaptors and macro extension tubes. There seemed to be a lot of interest in these inexpensive addons and the conversation quickly turned to all kinds of cool hacks and things you can do to/with your camera.
As we were quickly running out of time, our last discussion was around camera bags. There was just about every kind and style of ways to carry all that precious gear in the room and it ended up being a show and tell with everyone showing what they use and why.
Unfortunately, there was a little confusion about the end time so when we finally cleared out of the space used for PhotoCamp, the other sessions had already finished but we did manage to meet up with a bunch of BarCampers, had dinner and then finished up with a short photowalk around Granville Island at dusk.
Strangely, I barely took any photos yesterday.
Thanks to everyone that helped make BarCamp happen as well as everyone that came out to hear what I had to talk to about – I hope it was as useful to you as it was fun for me to share. See you next year!
Update: Here’s Roland’s Qik video of my iPhone session (shot with his Nokia):
Update #2: Here’s Warren’s interview video from my iPhone session:
I really wanted to do a proper, long and detailed wrapup post for SXSWi but I’m not going to because there was just so much going on and it’s still digesting in my mind what transpired in Austin. That and I’m really tired due to a day at the airport, flight delays and BBQ withdrawal.
So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:
this year was way bigger than last year – lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ’supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel – they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
12 sessions per time slot does not work
10am panels are very hard to attend
there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended – as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C – it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have – see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple – or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.
The countdown has begun to Thursday morning when many Vancouver locals will crawl out of bed much eariler than normal and head down to YVR to board their flights to Austin, Texas for the 2008 edition of South by Southwest. Many of us will be on the same flight which should make the trip that much more fun.
There is still a lot to do to prepare for the trip. I still have to go through the schedule of events while at SXSWi but may take it day by day instead of spending too much time planning every hour of the conference. There are many ways to see what’s going on from the official site, Upcoming, Facebook and the SXSW Insider on Ning to name few. If you’re planning on attending any events or parties, it’s probably a good idea to scope things out in advance and rsvp. While many events are open to all Interactive attendees with a badge, demand usually far exceeds capacity so get on a list if there is one and show up early.
While down in Texas, I’ll probably not be doing a lot of blogging around here until after the conference but will be dropping dispatches from Austin on Miss604, Flickr, Utterz and Twitter…and possibly other places depending on what I find and have time for.
As more of a backup plan in case Twitter implodes under heavy use during SXSW, I decided to setup my own pseudo version of it using the recently released Prologue theme for Wordpress. If you’re going to be down in Austin and want to try it out, drop me an email or direct message and I’ll add you to the list. Using this theme and a standard Wordpress install, we’ll be able to micro-blog what we’re doing without relying on other services to be available as well as not bombarding the non-attendees with tweets.
It’s pretty plain and simple at the moment (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it loads fast) and that could change if I get time between packing and getting ready. A nice feature of the theme is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of everyone’s posts or just a specific person so I’ll probably plug my feed into a few services.
That’s it for now….gotta go find my giant suitcase.
A few of us have been noticing that there hasn’t been as much chatter on the internet about Northern Voice during or immediately following the event. As well, the page views on Flickr seemed to be a lot lower than last year. Personally, I think it’s just that everyone hasn’t fully had a chance for it all to sink in yet. As I’m finding by new followers on Twitter, new contacts on Flickr and a bunch of new feeds I’ve been reading, it’s slowly gaining some momentum after the fact.
Let’s face it, a weekend of conferencing takes it’s toll on people and especially since most of the attendees have normal day jobs that they returned to almost immediately. It takes awhile to get your head around what you participated in and find a way to record or publish those thoughts. Not to mention taking care of all the things you didn’t tend to during the conference.
So in that vein, I thought I’d followup my somewhat brief recap with a few more cool things I’ve found since the weekend:
my pal, Duane Storey, pulled some awesome out of his hat with his amazing photo mosaic of all the tagged photos in Flickr he could hoover down. He called it 1600 reasons to love Northern Voice and I’m sure he’ll have to rename it as that photo number keeps growing as attendees get out their card readers and upload more shots to the Flickr stream. As Gene said in his post, if you can’t find yourself in those photos, you weren’t there.
I twittered about it a bit and mentioned it in my first recap but I keep coming across blog posts and photos of people that I wish I had a chance to either spend more time talking to or even just meeting at the conference. I guess one of the cons of going to a conference in your own town, with a lot of friends in attendance, is that you don’t get outside your circle as much as you would if you were somewhere you didn’t know many people. That and there is never enough time.
I wish I had an opportunity to chat with Stewart Mader whose presentation about Wiki’s I really enjoyed at last years NV and missed his this year. He’s been rounding up some great links and comments from other people as well as doing a great job liveblogging a lot of sessions
Another missed meet/chat was with Alan Levine who gave a great presentation on “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” in which he outlines some of the amazing web tools out there you can use to tell a story. Something he did with all 50 tools and the same story. Alan also managed to capture one of my favorite open mic sessions at the Opening Night party by Scott Leslie called Trackback Love.
I spent most of yesterday on Granville Island at 
