Ceviche at Casa del Lamb, originally uploaded by D’Arcy Norman.

This may be the only photo taken of the Friday night dinner at Brian’s house. Clockwise from the bottom left are:

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What timing– just a few days after making it an integral part of my portion of the Mashup for Non-Programmer’s workshop, during which I mentioned the long wait I have endured for features I’d heard were coming almost a year ago, Ning has rolled out their new version. The site’s a bit loaded at the moment, but from the looks of things there is some compelling new features, including more granularity and choice in the built-in services and layouts.

I suspect that most of my fellow Northern Voice speakers are as tired– or more– than I am. So I hope we get a blanket pass for not yet blogging more in the aftermath of Northern Voice. I’m trapped in the airport here for five more hours, but I have another presentation to finish preparing for, so it has to wait.

Northern Voice was a fantastic event that I can’t recommend highly enough. I know some people looked at the informal, laid-back nature of NV and assumed it was lightweight, but it’s really the kind of (un)conference that will give back as much as you want to put into it. Needless to say, the “networking” opportunities are endless (I hate to use the term networking because it sounds so business-like and clinical when the reality is so much warmer and rewarding… let’s say that the opportunities to connect were endless.

I learned a lot. I think I had a mini-breakthrough in the model I have been developing regarding education, social software, technological change, and learning communities. I met an astonishing number of accomplished and interesting people. I finally got to work with a number of people that have influenced my thinking and met many more who will do so in the future. I met some real friends, not just like-minded colleagues. And Vancouver is a great city. Despite their funny looking bills, two-dollar coins, and the whole rational metric system thing, I would have no problem spending a lot more time in Canada. Hard to imagine how the whole weekend could have been much better.

While we are here celebrating blogging and its power, let’s not forget either our fortune in being able to say what we like or those who are paying a price for speaking out.

Islam does have more than its fair share of violent activists and terrorists, Hosni Mubarak is a tool, and Egypt is– despite being an ally– showing itself as a backward nation. No one should be in jail for saying it.

The flu refuses to give in completely and sometimes I literally have no voice (and when I do I sound, to myself at least, like a cartoon character), but I am off to Vancouver, B.C. for Northern Voice 2007. I just can’t pass up the opportunity to meet and learn from so many great people, including quite a number who have been extremely influential on my thinking and career. Unlike most other conferences, NV seems to be as much about good old fashioned personal networking and discussion as presentations. I’ve had the privilege of attending quite a few different conferences and hearing from luminaries of every stripe– and occasionally even getting to spend a few minutes with them– but the chance for real discussion is usually rare.

And sometimes it’s just nice to have a chance to be “in the fold” with others who labor in the same areas and share so much background. The O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference has a similar comfortable feeling of being someplace I belong, but the lack of people involved in education, humanities, social sciences and citizen journalism is hard to deal with. NV appears to feature the best of all these worlds– the stellar attendee and speaker list of a “big” conference with the social and learning opportunities of an un-conference filled with my peers and mentors.