Northern Voice 08 MooseCamp Day 1.0

Well day 1 has been pretty cool. There were a few very interesting talks I attended: Using blogs for progressive and social change; Big media for social change.

Using blogs for progressive change was intriguing because it raised a point about who has control over your content. Copyright was an issue for a few folks because they tend to copy/paste content from other sites with or without reference (bad). However appropriately cited it’s ok. The big issue was that some people have had instances where they posted to their blog, only to find that their post was removed without any knowledge of the fact (thank you DMCA threats)! This happened on a dreamhost/wordpress blog, which btw is hosted in the United States. One more reason to self-host I say

Big media for social change was especially exciting as the CBC is now getting involved in bringing citizen journalism (sorry, that’s “Reporters”) to the masses. Basically you or I have the ability to capture and report on events happening and submit our blog/photos/comments directly to the CBC and you’ll be appropriately credited. I like the idea, and I hope they continue down this path – engaging the community as opposed to being just a medium is what today’s internet revolution is all about. Lisa Johnson from CBC Vancouver was presenting, here is the Northern Voice wiki page for this particular presentation.

Update: 0.5+0.5=1.0 (Afternoon)

So the afternoon started with my small plug note about Flock and how it can be used to blog and integrate social media assets (services/images/text/friends..) Joshua was kind enough to run through a bit of the workflow on his laptop as I was having some resolution issues on my mac – I blame it on my home theater projector setup. Anyways, I then went on to open up the floor to discuss what blogging tools people were using. Lots of people seem to use the standard web interface to their blog (a large majority using wordpress). A few people wanted to know more about how to customize themes, which may be a good topic to dive into tomorrow – maybe a good hallway hackathon??

The coolest presentation I thought was photocamp… <drool> I wish I had seen the entire thing but I walked in just as Reilly and Miranda were doing their talk – man did I get schooled on dynamic lighting! I could not believe the colour changes Reilly was able to pull of on the car, that was amazing. I really wish there was some “standard point and shoot” image vs. “dynamic lighting” comparisons made on each set of photos – maybe next time <hint> The ease in which Matt was able to apply modifications to his photos in photoshop was really cool.