Notes on Why Stories are Essential

Julie Leung is up on stage now to present her keynote Starting with Fire: Why Stories are Essential and How to Blog Effective Tales. Julie always has an interesting presentation so this should be good.

Just as she did at Gnomedex, Julie has started by sharing a story from her past, using pictures to illustrate her words. I’ll pick out some of the key quotes from her story.
“We are surrounded by stories. Nature reveals why stories are important.”
“It is in our nature to seek stories. We are our stories.”
“Stories can be indirect, yet powerful. Stories are perfect for complexity.”
“Stories are tools of change.”
“Stories heal us emotionally.”
“We come together around stories. They continue culture, and they change culture.”
“Stories are essential because stories are essentially human.”

Julie is now sharing some of her principles for blogging stories:

What is a story? They usually have a beginning, a middle, and an end. However “one way”, is for traffic signs! She highlight’s Robert McKee’s book “Story”.
Change the familiar! Avoid cliches, but also try to take the ordinary and give it new color and new meaning.
How to begin? When beginning a story, listen and link to others.
Take notes. Include sensory details.
Use the power of pause, blank space, etc.
Blogging has a freedom you can’t find in other places – a story can be any shape or size. You can break a story into many pieces, and each can become a blog post.
Hiding! Make it suspenseful, as in life, we don’t know all of the story until the end.
Experiment to continue growing as a blogger.
Voice comes naturally, and you’ll find it as you experiment and share your stores.
Have fun, be creative, and play.
It’s the raw and sometimes the imperfect that speaks to us the most.
Linking and commenting make stories real. The story is corrected, confirmed and can lead to collaboration. It takes two to make a story, the teller and the listener.
Blogging is transforming story telling.
Be generous and creative with links; they can add another dimension to stories.

Now Julie is sharing some examples of blogging stories:

Julie says: start with fire, start with the hearth.

Opening Remarks

Darren Barefoot just started giving his opening remarks in the theatre here at UBC. Looks like there’s quite a few people who decided to sleep in this morning – lots of empty chairs in the room!

This year the conference has a “kid’s room”; a place where parents can take their kids and self-organize to supervise. Everyone has been asked not to take photos of kids or blog their names without their parents permission.

Coffee comes at 10:15 AM, even though Megan just ran to Starbucks! Time for Julie…

BBQ, Curious George, and more!

After the wrap up at Moosecamp today I went on the photo walk to Stanley Park with Dickson, Megan and a bunch of other Northern Voicers. The weather was fairly nice so we got to take some good pictures while enjoying the walk. The BBQ was Boris Mann’s idea, and it went very well!

Eventually we decided to head off, stopping for Starbucks on the way. We went to the one at Davies and Denman, and I have to say it is probably one of the largest Starbucks I have ever been in! So roomy.

We just got back from the theatre – we went to see Curious George. It was a great movie, and definitely a “kids” movie. Not like Shrek or something where there is innuendo for the adults, but a true kids movie. Don’t get me wrong though, it was very entertaining!

Lots of walking today, lots of paying attention, and now I am getting sleepy. We’re up early tomorrow morning for the actual conference day, and looking forward to it!

Scoble's Vista Demo

So the icon is a little different, but we’re still at Northern Voice. This session is a demo – Robert Scoble is going to be sharing Windows Vista (hence the graphic!). Here are my notes:

Scoble’s just getting things setup now, looks pretty sexy so far, people are watching and chatting. I can hear a few people in the audience saying “that’s just expose” or something – the Mac bunch is out in full force!
This is not a scripted demo! Chris Pirillo is helping out. The build used in this demo is only two nights old!
They are starting by showing a video of two machines, XP against Vista, to see the stress on the system. Windows XP is failing under the stress – essentially they simulate 100% CPU usage with different levels of priority. Now for Vista: much, much better!
Underneath the covers, things are quite a bit different.
Chris has been talking with the UI team to make sure all of the artwork, icons, etc. are updated.
Aero is supposed to evoke a feeling of “more space” on the desktop.
Scoble is not showing the tablet, media, or any of the other custom versions.
You now have the ability to do per-application volume levels!
Entire networking stack has been rewritten, and the performance is about 40 times better between Vista and Vista compared to what it was with XP. There is a 2-10 times performance between Vista and Linux machines.
Customization for colors and that sort of thing is much, much improved. No more Blue, Silver and Green – you can choose anything! Chris says he’s been hammering away at making sure that the fit and polish makes it into the product.
Apparently when it crashes in the beta builds, a dialog box appears that says “Blue Screen” 🙂
Search really is everywhere, in every window.
When you edit photos, the original and the edit are both saved, so you can always go back to the original photo. And RAW is handled by default.
The new IE7 is “open search compliant” – something created by A9. Chris says this is basically RSS search.
Printing has been completely revamped, so printing is easier and much more accurate.
IE7 converts everything to RSS 2.0 and uses a transform to display it in the browser. When you subscribe, the feed is pushed to a central store. Windows Mail is the aggregator by default, though IE does save the feeds and stuff. Outlook 12 has an RSS aggregator using the same feed store.
The RSS rendering in IE7 also strips out anything that might be a security concern.
Apparently the Gadgets will be Firefox compatible.
Beta 2 is coming in the next month or so, release sometime in August with a release candidate sometime in the middle, which means users should have it around Christmas time.
The concept of tagging and stacking files is definitely in the product. People using the product so far are losing the concept of hierarchies, which is good for everyone!
Vista looks awesome!

To end, Chris announces that he has OS X running on his ThinkPad (the developer build). And now we better leave before the Apple lawyers descend…

Notes on Leadership

Next up is Dave Sifry’s session on leadership and entrepreneurship (yep, he’s the founder of Technorati). Here are my notes:

There’s a distinction between leadership and management! The latter is a function of the former.
You’ve got to be a little insane to start a technology venture! You have to have passion.
Dave: “I’ll never fill a position just to fill a position.” Think of the A-level person hires a B who hires a C scenario.
Product-Feature-Company: when you have an idea, is it a feature, a product, or a company? Can you write your business model on the back of napkin? Or at least, the back of an envelope – goal should be cocktail napkin.
Dave says “don’t do it” to outside investment. There’s nothing quite like getting a cheque from a customer. Hold off on outside investment as long as you can!
If you do go the outside investment route: get a good lawyer, give homework to your board, etc.

At this point Dave went around the room and entrepreneurs introduced themselves and their businesses and shared a leadership or startup hack. There are so many good ones I couldn’t possibly share them all here, you kind of have to be here. I am surprised at how many entrepreneurs are in the room!

Dave’s rules for entrepreneurs (from his first or second slide) meant to be discussion points:

Find your passion
Team, team, team
Lead, don’t manage
Develop Leaders (80% on yout top 20%)
Prepare for the scalability traps
Back of the napkin it!
Remember, it is a business
Vision is easy, execution is hard
Fail fast
Be of service

Photocamp

The next session I am attending is Kris Krug’s first Photocamp (I think there are related sessions), kind of a mini Moosecamp just for photography. Apparently northernvoice is among the most popular tags in Flickr for the week. This is an hour long session, followed by a photo walk to Stanley Park later tonight, so it should be interesting.

The number one piece of advice Kris has is to take lots and lots of photos.
Derek K. Miller says that being familiar with film cameras teaches you a lot about how to use your digital camera.
Almost expired film will give you some interesting color compositions! People seem to really like film, though as Kris notes, it is very expensive.
Derek says film is not going to go away, but it will be incredibly niche. No one in their right mind is going to buy a film camera. Kris notes its harder and harder to find places to get film developed now, even at places that sell film!
Roland suggests using ShoZu for sharing pictures from your cameraphone.
Someone from Flickr is saying that you should have a camera with an adapter ring so you can attach polarizers and the like.
Learn all the buttons on your camera! On a DSLR, there is usually a button that lets you preview depth of field changes and stuff.
Scoble says for portraits, a good lens is around 100mm. Kris says a 50mm f1.8 Canon plastic lens is probably the best for your money.
The shot will be 30% sharper at the middle of the aperature than completely wide or completely narrow. Good tip from Scoble!
A typical sensor in a digital camera is 2/3rds the side of a professional digital camera sensor, which effectively makes a 100mm lens a 160mm lens. Someone else notes that the smaller sensor isn’t just a digital thing, it has been around in film too.
The camera body is just the conduit for the lens – Kris spends most of his money on the lens instead of the camera. Don’t buy an EF-S lens, definitely go for EF, according to Kris. The good stuff happens in the glass!
Another person suggests that there’s nothing wrong with EF-S. A key factor is budget, as there are lots of different things that make a photo great or not.
RAW format is lossless, and applies white balance and effects AFTER the fact, so they need to be post-processed. They are also huge files. RAW really means coming right off the CCD sensor, as raw as possible.
Kris says to check out VanDigiCam.com.
Another tip is that you can rent expensive camera gear!
Will Pate’s tip is to pick one thing, and learn all about it. Pick something like “framing” and stick to it. Isolate the variables!
Tip: play around with the rule of thirds! Break the shot into a tic-tac-toe grid and don’t always put the subject in the centre.
Tip: play with bracketing! That is when you take one shot, then a few more shots at over and under exposure so you can pick the one that works best. Find the bracket mode on your camera and play with it!
Tip: consume photography! Look at photos that you like. Take photo walks and you’ll learn about about lighting and stuff, especially if you can go with a professional!
Tip: change your perspective! Don’t always shoot at eye level.

I realize that I am very much a point and shoot kind of photographer. I really should read up on all of the sorts of camera settings I can change.

Notes on Community

Bad news – something is wrong with Megan’s laptop. We took a quick look, and its either corrupt system files or some sort of hard drive failure. Too lazy to switch rooms, so we’re sticking around for the session in this room, which is all about community. So far it seems much more discussion oriented than presenter oriented. Here are some notes:

Scoble says to him, community is just linking, and it has paid off in spades.
Someone else says making connections is what’s important. Conversations between people is what networking is all about.
Your blog: writing yourself into existence – writing about things you’re interested in. What are the conversational topics of interest?
Debbie, who is writing an undergraduate thesis on blogging communities, has found that despite the fact that the Internet can cross boundaries of time, space, etc. people end up building networks with people in their same geographic regions.
Someone notes that the community becomes much larger through RSS.
Scoble agrees with another fellow that the extended community is what is most important and valuable. I guess there’s physical networks in some places more naturally than others. Another lady says that someone has to take the initiative.
The process of invitation: how is it different for blogging? Someone notes you can essentially invite yourself, which is different than many other communities.
Someone suggests that it’s important to know something about the blogger in realspace (or meatspace).
If you don’t blog, you can’t really relate to the feelings and networks that can be created in virtual and then real space.
Someone says that to him, community is when the people involved make an effort to know the other members – it’s more than just linking together.
Kevin Marks suggests that access is what makes community important; access to experts, thought leaders, etc.
Lloyd from Flock wonders how we make the conversation accessible? Maybe its too hard to be part of a community?
Comments are an important part of community it seems, very quick almost impromptu conversations.

This has been a very cool session, I like the discussion way of talking about a topic.

Notes on Podcasting & Video Blogging

Lunch is a meal I generally skip, so I got to spend some time talking to Robert Sanzalone during the break. He’s presenting a session on podcasting and video blogging – here are some notes:

Robert says podcasting kind of came from Apple…I disagree, but I see where he’s going with it. Apple has the iPod and rolled in support to iTunes, so they give the impression of being the first.
Blogger is a great tool to get people blogging – all you have to do is link an MP3 file. I suppose in the most simple terms, sure, but there’s more to that. You need the enclosure tag.
Robert suggests using Audacity for recording and editing, some other audience members suggest using GarageBand if you’re on a Mac.
Sounds like Robert likes video – he has used MovieMaker and says it works quite well. He suggests that if you have a digital camera with video capabilities, you can produce videos. I suppose…but the quality there is not so good.
Who is your audience? Robert says that’s a problem with the “tech” community, they don’t always consider the wider audience.
A video tool/service he likes is vimeo.
Another service he likes is YouTube, because it transcodes the video for you. In a way I suppose, but it’s not like you can download the video. A service that does have downloading is Revver – looks like they transcode everything to MOV format.
Robert says a service that does some more of the pieces is blip.tv. You can connect it with Flickr too. It still stays in the format you upload it in though.
The service that does the best job, according to Robert, is Dailymotion.
If Flickr does video, none of the other services will matter – is the general feeling it seems.

Lots to think about with video, I still don’t think we’re ready for it.

Notes on Structured Content

Time for another session – Dickson and Megan have gone to a different one this time. Oh, and I notice Scoble’s tablet is actually a newer model than mine (I think…larger screen too). Here are some notes on Bryan Rieger’s session on structured content (this is essentially a Semantic Web concept):

Very interesting use of lego to represent how structured blogging produces blocks. Say a block for the title, one for the text, one for tags (which are already a microformat), etc.
Microformats: designed for humans first, machines second. Keep it as simple as possible. Solve a specific problem.
Developers: support both commas and spaces!
Typically a structured blog post looks the same as any other post, which is good for users.
Why bother? Some reasons: search, commerce, and many other things we haven’t begun to think of yet…
Current structured content types: licenses, tags, reviews, lists, calendars, events, media, people, organizations, etc.
Some places to check out are http://microformats.org and http://structuredblogging.com.
The tools have to support these formats, and for the user, entering these things has to be quick and easy!
We’re creating this content for humans, so why the effort in creating something for machines? Well, one person says it makes presentation much simpler, across various machines and interfaces.
Boris Mann suggests this is all about accessibility, and again, the tools have to support it.
Bryan says a larger problem than tools support, is why would people do this? We need to get people to want to do this!
Are we extending blogging or RSS? Bryan says neither.
Someone mentioned that there’s a project to create a structured version of Atom, so you wouldn’t need an RSS feed, as it would essentially be built in. I assume you just throw a stylsheet in front of the Atom document for browser rendering.
Interesting discussion about how HTML has already gotten us so far, perhaps the solution to structured content is simple…
Scoble thinks the “way in” for structured content is with maps, allowing a blogger to put a review on a map at a specific address.

Finally at Moose Camp – notes on Journalism

So we slept in a little this morning, and we took our time. Compared to past trips, this one has been relatively relaxing thus far! We finally made it to UBC’s downtown campus (entirely underground in case you didn’t know) and got our lanyards. Kind of neat idea – in addition to your name and web address on the nametag, there are four lines for “tags”.

We’re in Mark Hamilton’s session called We’re all journalists now. Right next to us? Robert Scoble with the same tablet pc as I am typing this on. Here are some notes on the session:

Some people in the room seem to think that there is great power in having tools that make publishing very easy and always on, while others thing that creates a larger problem of filtering and managing new information.
Scoble makes the point that he can write about a product and a week later 3000 people have signed up for that new product, and that this method of distribution did not exist ten years ago. Others disagree, saying the scheme has always been here, we’re just confused with “blogging” being new.
Someone mentions the long tail – noting there are three or four bloggers for every topic, and this has a huge impact on commerce.
Mark says the democratization of media is very confusing…there are so many different perspectives. He also notes that he has 3.7 days of podcasts on his iPod, and that the creators of those podcasts are not going to stop and wait for him to catch up, they are going to continue producing content.
Mark touches on the fear of not being connected – you feel like you’ve missed something if you don’t keep up, or if you forget your camera, etc. Some conclusions he’s had: in terms of mass media, we have never been as well served as we are now, but it still has a whole bunch of flaws; there are so many different and new types of journalism like video blogs and sites like NowPublic; journalists are starting to realize that collectively, the audience is smarter!
Journalism right now is messy, just like tagging. Things are changing. Maybe it’s going to be messy forever?
Chris Pirillo is wondering whether “amateurs” should be called journalists? What about journalists who go through formal training and that sort of thing? Mark notes that strictly speaking, there is no credential for a journalist, anyone can walk into a newspaper and become a journalist. Chris says, “if I can apply a bandaid, does that make me a doctor?” People are fighting him on this one, but I tend to agree…just because you’re a blogger doesn’t mean you’re a journalist.

Thank goodness for wireless 🙂

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