Northern Voice Conference: Widgets Talk

Only one more sleep till Northern Voice! Northern Voice is a community organized conference happening here in Vancouver this week. This is it’s fourth year (wow!), and the second out at the University of British Columbia campus.

NV08 in a nutshell:

• 21 Feb (Thu) - Opening party 6p.m. at the Waldorf
• 22 Feb (Fri) - MooseCamp, an “unconference” including Internet BootCamp for beginners. Lead or participate in spontaneous sessions and go to the sessions that make sense for you
• 23 Feb (Sat) - “Traditional” conference covering all aspects of social media including blogging, videoblogging, etc.

The idea of Northern Voice is to create an informal events for all kinds of bloggers, from tech geeks to personal bloggers. I’ve gone all four years, and it’s such a great event. You don’t get much of that professional posturing you sometimes see at professional and technical conferences and there is always something to learn. Unfortunately, if you haven’t registered, it is sold out, but if you’re going, be sure to come to my talk on blog widgets:

Widgets
On a blog, lots of valuable information is contained in the sidebar and usually blog software comes with some content already in the sidebar, like links to your categories, archives, and RSS feed. But you can include much more than blog content in your sidebar: you can put widgets onto your blog in this space!

Many blogger use widgets to have a little fun by recommending books they like or letting folks know what music they’re listening to. And there are more widgets than you can imagine out there.

In this session I show you some of my favorite widget tools, and walk you through how to put them into some of the common blog software. And before you go crazy, I’ll tell you about what the impact of loading all these widgets will have on your blog’s performance.

A few of the widgets I’ll discuss: photo feeds, blog rolls, books and music, surveys, and instant updates!

Hey, if you have a widget you think I should feature, leave me a comment here!

AdHack says: Love is Never Boring

My good friend James Sherrett has a project he’d like to bring to your attention: AdHack. Building on the ways in which blogs have proven to be popular and powerful, James has create a Web community of designers, photographers and creators who are pushing the advertising envelope.

Anyone can create an ad. Anyone can buy an ad. AdHack acts like an eBay for ad creative, connecting ad buyers and ad creators. Learn more on the public site at http://www.adhack.com

Have a look at the “Chocolate Love” ad created by AdHack member Giant Ant Media. “Chocolate Love” is a short, stop-motion animation, shot on a light box. 367 Frames.
http://adhack2.com/public/detail/2444-1177

Got a great idea for a Valentine’s day ad you think the world should see? It doesn’t all have to be about chocolate! Visit http://www.adhack.com and sign up for access to the alpha site and get creative!

Oh, and happy Valentine’s day!

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

If you’ve ever wondered just what happens when you post something to your blog, you’re not alone. Some things are obvious: the post ends up on your blog, and if you have date or category archives, it gets dropped into the right spots to appear on those pages, too. But you’ve probably heard a lot about how blogs are ideal for generating search engine results and Web traffic, and maybe you’ve wondered how that happens exactly.

Wonder no longer. Wired magazine ran a story on January 22 that explains exactly what happens, complete with an amazing info graphic.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits—to You
Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.