I spent most of today outside of my box expanding my horizons. I went to my first web conference (my first anything conference) called Northern Voice 2008. There, I learned things about blogging and social media on the Internet that I don’t entirely understand the basics for. I went alone (which means I had to make friends with people I wouldn’t normally get the chance to be around and thus have a really hard time relating to with such a basic technical awareness!). Next, then I came home to update my blog software, only to find myself learning command line, of all things! I will talk more about command line in another post as it is its own little box.
Northern Voice is a conference about the voices of the web, blogging - live, video, micro and otherwise, pod-casting (weee!), social media, wiki, tagging, stats etc. Today’s schedule had two streams: either spend time in the 101 section learning about each type of media or attend the random sessions of interest pertaining to the media. Myself, having never had formal instruction in any of the above, decided that it would be best to establish the basics. Wrong. The basics meant: why should you blog? what is a podcast, what is a wiki? was therefore, believe it or not, below my skill set! So, I hit up the instructors for pod-casting tutelage on the lunch break and learned how to fix my broken podcast, which now works but is incredibly slow to upload due to the formatting of the file (I believe). Tomorrow I will learn about how to make that more efficient. To be honest, if the only thing I come away from this conference knowing is how to get my podcast up on my site, I will be more than happy. My one suggestion would be that they have 200 level courses for those who want to develop basic skills in the function of their media of choice and consequently make the sessions longer.
Tomorrow there is a whole gamut of things on the NV08 schedule, I am mostly interested in the future of social media (for Yoga West) and getting published (book to blog or blog to book). Then I have a choice, I can stay for the afternoon events, or I can go to the library to participate in a workshop on fantasy writing called “Possible Worlds”. Since I will have enough to run with on the blogging front I think it will be time for a break for computers - writing workshop it is then.
I am going to go and rest my brain, here’s to renewed zeal for the blogosphere!
L.