Northern Voice 2007

I couldn't go to a blogging conference and leave without posting once, from the conference. In this case, I'm in the Forestry Center at UBC, attending Northern Voice 2007 (tagged @ technorati northernvoice, nv07). The conference arranged guest access to the UBC wireless network, which is how I'm posting. I must say, I could get used to being able to fire up a browser follow along the presenters' content, or do a quick search on a tool or service they have mentioned, or see if I can disambiguate an anagram I didn't quite catch as it whizzed past. And I've never been surrounded by so many Macs at one time in my life!

Things I have learned about that are likely to be useful:

• Digital Photography Review
  
• Luminous Landscape (needs hypen, otherwise you wind up at the usual marketing-all site)
  
• a lot of manufacturers are releasing new camera models for PMA, in March
  
• noise is beginning to limit high resolution cameras can go. Having 10 MPx may be no better than having 7.
  
• having taken pathetic non-programmer stabs at creating screen scrapers, and having hit the Google API and bounced - my ambitions far, far exceeding my competence - I was delighted to be introduced to Dapper, Screen Scraper or OpenKapow, which can be used to create structured outputs for aggregation
  
• information pulled from multiple sources can be combined in ingenious ways using Yahoo! Pipes, del.icio.us (brilliant idea, still find the moniker a touch pre.cio.us) - see Mashups for Non-Programmers
  
• Wordpress has a multitude of fascinating plug-ins that can be used to pull in content from Flickr, YouTube, etc
  
• Drupal, an open-source CMS is too heavy-weight for a single site (possibly), but the UofC and others are using Drupal to explore the possibilities of blogs and wikis in University education, see weblogs.calgary
  
• blogs and wikis are converging
  
• tags help but are not enough; nor is search sufficient
  

Next session's up; unfortunately, I should leave now to pick up my bag from the Y downtown and get to the 1730 bus, rather than waiting for the last bus. The pickup spot I would normally use has been displaced by construction; getting from the skytrain station to the main bus station is not something I'd do after dark; and the connection on the other side between the ferry and the local bus just isn't, leaving me with a 2 mile walk at the other end.