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!

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