Northern Voice 2006: my day two
The second day of Northern Voice 2006, the conference on blogs that was held in Vancouver yesterday and today, was generally a better experiance for me than day one [mbv][js]. The first day was the more informal self-organized MooseCamp portion where the sessions were organized and staffed by attendees instead of people chossen by the organizers.
Today was the real thing and it was much better. While yesterday tended to be a bit of a love-in, the main theme of it being that blogs were great, today was a bit more balanced. Particularly good was the legal seminar hosted by Lauren Wood, Darren Barefoot [db] and Boris Mann. I missed the seminar about blogging and relationships, which was going on at the same time, but the feedback was that that one was good as well.
Overall day two was much better. I’d have to see what sort of topics they were going to cover next year before I decided to go again. One of the major problems I think is that the conference has to service so many different types of bloggers that it’s aim is too wide. There are people there who don’t know the first things about blogging, people like me who are comfortable with the surface technical level of blogging but are wanting to learn more about that aspect, others who might have the technical side down but really could learn how to write and on and on.
Having organized a few conferences myself I know how hard it must have been to put this together, and I compliment everyone involved on the job. I’m glad I ended up going this year, and if you didn’t get to go I do recomend it next year.
Personally, I thought it’d have been rather more helpful to have invited a lawyer onto the panel on legal issues. As it was, the three panelists spent half their time simply retelling anecdotes, and the other half shying away from any real advice because, um, they were not lawyers.
Meanwhile, it’s also true that the wide range of blogging experience there made it difficult for some speakers. I saw this most especially with the session on design, which tried herorically, but inevitably failed, to connect both with those who still use the standard Blogger (etc.) templates, and with those who have designed their own sites, both with those looking to hire designers, and with those wanting to tinker for themselves.
But the conference was fun, nonetheless.
Well a legal panel could be focused more on how to avoid getting the lawyers’ letter and then you know you’re in a good position when and if it comes.
The four defences against libel (truth, permission, fair comment and privilage) are fairly simple to go over, as is libel chill.
One idea I had was that the conference could be broken into two. One focused on writing with some simple things on journalism ethics, libel law, how to write and things like that. The other part of the conference would on technical things like comment spam, trackbacks, and such.
The personal stories were intresting and fairly helpful as illustrative examples.
Of course my view is skewed having gone through a whole lot of Canadian Univeristy Press conferences.
Yeah, nothing really against the anecdotes per se–they kept things light. But they were rather insufficient on their own.
To be fair, the conference was indeed more or less divided between technical and non-technical sessions. But that doesn’t really address the problem of different experiences. Technopeasants like myself and technosophisticates alike (or knitting bloggers and venture capitalists, say) are all interested in design, for instance: but they’re interested in different ways, and want different kinds of answers to the same basic question (”How do I make my blog look good?”).
Likewise, we’re all, I take it, interested in how to write: it’s just that writing a personal blog is rather different from writing a business one.
Yeah, but I do think there are constants, and general guidlines. Whether you’re doing a blog on knitting or on computers or business there’s a way to write a lede, and formart a post to make it readable.
As for layout I think that can work for any level of expertise. There’s a difference between how layout it done and what looks good. A session on what looks good (a clean layout with not a lot of crap) and how to select the layou that’s right for your blog doesn’t have to divide people because it’s the same whether you’re building your own blog or using Blogger templates.
True, there are constants and overlaps. It’s just that negotiating the particular and the general can be tricky, and very demanding of speakers and faciliators alike.
In truth, we did look around for a lawyer. We had no luck finding one that a) knew enough about the subject matter and b) was willing to participate.
During the session, I remarked that there were so many considerations that you could have an entire conference on blogging and the law. And today I happened upon it:
http://www.lawseminars.com/section_details/06BLOGCA.htm