Northern Voice: Pacific NW Blogging Conference

I was visiting Julie Leung’s Seedlings & Sprouts, when I read something that made me quite jealous. Julie attended last year’s BloggerCon in Boston. When I first read about BloggerCon a year or more ago I felt so left out that such a wonderful concept was happening 3,000 miles away where I couldn’t participate. I wrote to Dave Winer asking if he’d consider a west coast conference. He never wrote back. Now, Julie tells me that there already has been a Silicon Valley BloggerCon. Woops! I missed it. But not to fear, Julie and several co-conspirators have banded together to create Northern Voice, a one-day blogging conference in Vancouver, BC on Saturday, February 19th at the University of British Columbia.

There will be sessions on blogging technology, publicizing blogs, blogging and politics, blogging & family life–the public vs. the private sphere, blogging in academia among other programs.

Blogging often is quite a solitary enterprise in which we are isolated from friends, family and even the world around us. A conference like this can be a great antidote to such isolation. If we really want to create a blogging community that extends beyond the virutal world, then we owe it to ourselves to go out and create networks and relationships based on meeting real people in the real world (well, not that the virtual world isn’t real–it certainly can be). It will make our blogging world that much stronger.