Geeking out at Northern Voice

For the past couple of weeks, my husband had a rip-roaring time making fun of me.

“You’re such a geek!” he said. “What, you’re going to bed already? Don’t you have to blog something?” and my personal favorite, “You’re the cutest blogging dork I know.”

(Ok so maybe that last one was just me projecting.)

He doesn’t get why I blog but that’s ok, because there are plenty of people who do. And a lot of them were at Northern Voice with me this Saturday.

Northern Voice is a blogging conference here in Vancouver that’s in its 5th year. When Duaner convinced me to go with him last year, I had been writing on a relatively obscure personal blog for a little over a year, and hadn’t put too much thought into why I blogged or what my goals were. But the conference was engaging and energizing, and I really enjoyed it. Most of all, it watered a little seed in my mind.

This year, I came to the conference with some more experience. Blogging for Weddingbee (which I think gets close to a million page views a month now), has given me a new perspective why I do it. Not to mention the fact that I ditched my old blog and personal brand in January in favor of starting a-fresh with my new modified-surname-moniker. I was really looking forward to learning something new and I vowed I would participate more this year.

I made good on that vow by first buying two tickets to the kick-off dinner–something I hadn’t done last year. Being the good sport he is, my husband said he’d go with me, even though he’s not a blogger and doesn’t really get why I do it.

But then I had a flash of ‘good finking’ and decided to ditch him and invite Laura instead. We’ve been following each other’s blogs for awhile but had never met, and when I read something she wrote about wanting to attend BlogHer, I realized she would probably appreciate attending the Northern Voice dinner way more than Mr Fink. We went. We ate. We danced. We had fun. It may have been the best blind date ev-ah.

I couldn’t attend Friday’s un-conference as I had to work (and oh, how grateful I am daily that I have a job to go to!) so Saturday was my conference day. Summing up an entire mind-expanding day in just a few words is hard so I’ll pretend I’m on Twitter and give you the highlights:

Nora Young‘s keynote was awesome and I’m slightly embarrassed that I haven’t been following Spark. Will now.

Rob Cottingham had us in stitches. Srsly. The dude is FUN.NEE. Showed us all the light side of what we do.

I have a love-hate rel’ship w/ analysts but I love Nate Elliott of Forrester. His social media influencer data made my heart race.

The sassy socmed ‘It Girls’ of Vancity spoke on personal branding without saying the word “brand”. Impressive.

I did my best to take mental notes in the session on Social Media Mores for the Modern Couple but it was hard to do while guffawing. Great panel.

It was a long day but a good day. The spring in my step has been restored and I don’t care what Mr Fink calls me; I will keep on bloggin’.