cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Vancouver is indeed a special place for me. I’ll take any bait to attend a conference there, though no incentive is needed for Northern Voice. It always has been, and even with its growth this year to over 500 attendees, more than your garden variety slap a name tag on my and call me Joe kind of conference.

[Medieval Latin cnferentia, from Latin cnferns, cnferent-, present participle of cnferre, to bring together; see confer.]

The Latin origin for the word for this event mentions nothing of bludgeoning by PowerPoint or Conference Chicken, so none of the normal conference stuff that makes my fur itch really happens at Northern Voice.

Proof? Check out the kind of chicken that they served here:

tise
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ariane Colenbrander

At my first MooseFest in 2006 I remember then the compulsion to try and capture via blogging every bit of the experience– and for something I will aim to circle back to– really at that time, blogging was about the only venue of personal publishing. YouTube had been out maybe a year, Facebook was still some ivy league college only private web space, the folks who eventually built twitter were focused on a podcast service. Social media? Blogs were it, beyond flickr.

It was that desire to “capture” that led me to skip a session to blog Nancy White’s session which itself to a series of unplanned but wonderful spontaneous network connections I’ve filed under the “Amazing Stories” category.

By 2008 and 2009 I was less invested in trying to do the blogging the experience bit, and dabbled some in documenting the experience in VoiceThread (2008, 2009).

This year gets a scattered, I’m stuck in a delay at the airport after a few days in Vancouver for Northern Voice 2010- the Olympic Delayed version. Actually, May turned out to be a glorious time of year weather wise for the conference, which was still at the UBC campus, but in the larger venue of the Life Sciences building.