Charles Bock and the fine folks at Random House are giving away a free PDF of Charles Bock’s novel Beautiful Children. It’s available until midnight this Friday (February 29).

I think it is a cool idea.

Quote: Galley Cat is reporting the following:

Bock’s reasoning for approving this giveaway is simple: “I want people to read the book. If that means giving it away for free on-line, great.” UPDATE: Not that he’s letting this “free” stuff go to his head; as an anonymous tipster pointed out, in tiny, faint lettering at the bottom of the website, there’s a little note that says “© Copyright 2008. Charles Bock. This is our intellectual property, so kindly don’t fucking steal it.”

Download the free eBook until Feb 29.

(Source: Dan Wagstaff, thanks Dan!)

Blogging expert Susannah Gardner got into the back-end of a couple of different blog systems and showed us how to add these widgets to sidebars and content.

(And David’s blog will be just fine–she’ll fix that little code error. I’m just kidding. Adding widgets is easy.)

Couple of widgets I learned about:
* www.polldaddy.com (cool surveys for your site)
* www.thisnext.com (cool this is what you want to buy next)

I was telling some duck stories earlier.

Duck Photo Shoot

Blogging & Social Media: Where do we go from here?
Presenter: Matt Mullenweg

I’m going to listen.

UPDATE:

Expression
* Most important thing about WordPress is the Presentation, ability to change the design (someone changes presentation every second)
* Facebook, most important thing is the Inbox, ability to send spam-free messages; 2nd is the photos (50% of the page views are to photo pages)

Public
Interaction
Validation
Form Dictates Writing: the tools affect the content people post.

Tools to Check:
Tumblr

Exhortations

4 million WordPress pages per [minute? day? month?] vs 2.1 Wikipedia pages.

photomatt.net is now ma.tt

Achilles Hell of Web 2.0 is spam.

Facebook’s “request” application crap is spam. This is their first big mistake.

Respect people’s time. Single guiding principle for any software development (for anything really: advertising)

Suggestion from recent research says advertising is clicked on by lower income, less education, spend a lot of time online.Let’s verify that.

Advertising needs to evolve. (Hello AdHack)

Megabrands are going to die or be the success model for blogs? Why do you put your brand name in front of everything? Why does each brand have so many sub-brands?

Yahoo’s Flickr, Yahoo News, etc.

Danah Boyd has a great post on this.

YouTube’s related video is their prized thing.

Wikipedia has in-line links as their key thing.

Open Source:
0. the freedom to run the program for any purpose
1-3 great “freedoms” of open source (study, redistribute, improve).

Firefox, Wikipedia (open source, open sourced)

UPDATE 2:
Listen to the podcast of Matt Mullenweg’s Keynote Address.

Robert Ouimet of At Large Media recorded Matt Mullenweg’s keynote address. I thought it was a great speech. He clearly thought about the audience and delivered a top notch address. I think Matt is a very smart cookie, and he totally whipped Boris and I at Wii Tennis. Next time you’re in Van Matt–I want a rematch!

Headline Sponsors

Mt Lehman

Vancity

Royal Roads    

Voxant

Sponsors

Scribble Wiki

Flock

New Media Consortium   

Social Signal

Peer 1

Webnames.ca

Volunteers

UBC

Sun Microsystems    

Hop Studios

Raincity Studios

Sxip

AdHack

Straight from the lobbyist for Icefields comes this message. It has my support but not my creative energy for writing something original today (trying to gather my thoughts for tomorrow’s Northern Voice panel).

Quote: The Canada Reads “People’s Choice” voting engine is up and running, on the bottom right corner of the page at:
http://www.cbc.ca/canadareads/

Cast your vote as soon as possible (from every computer at your disposal) for Thomas Wharton’s well-loved novel Icefields, the first book by an Alberta author to compete in Canada Reads!

The Canada Reads 2008 debates will be broadcast daily on CBC Radio One from February 25th to 29th at 11:30 am and 7:30 pm (EST/MST/PST).

Tune in and root for Tom (and Steve)!

Jim DeLa Hunt

Canadian Tourism Commission should have a blog in multi-languages, in particular French and English.

Everyone here needs Hummingbird Translations, a great, local Vancouver translation company.

The plan is to talk about:

* Structure
* Content
* Tools
* Translation
* Process
* Politics

Good sites:
* Climb to the Stars (English and French, has summary of the article in the other language)
* Bank of Canada (official Canadian government bank, must publish exactly the same content in exactly the same moment)
* delicious tag of Nancy White on multi-lingual bloggers, Beverley Trainer developed Ruby on Rails platform to work, see ciaris.org
* Wikipedia is a massive, multi-lingual site
* Pop Montreal
* Global Voices
* Joi Ito
* Suw Charman
* Diego Leal, edu-blogger

Questions & Thoughts:
* The invisible posts that are not in your language.
* Tags are interesting way to allow for discovery, tag with multi-lingual.
* URL tells you content language, put in domain, i.e. google.jp
* Offer direction on language
* In URL, site.com/english/
* Joomlah “guess a language” indicator.
* Offer menu.
* Search engines, multiple URLs to same content.
* Ping translators of new content to translate.
* Dotsub comes up again.
* Network effects for translators, using IM

How to mash up content, mid-role, post-role, etc. of licensed content on your blog.

For example, NHL is on YouTube without ads. If you’re not trying to make money on your blog, great, grab that YouTube feed without the ads. But if you want to make money on your site. Then you can add these pre-role, mid-role and post-role ads to licensed content, then Voxant is one place to investigate.

It’s an interesting way to add licensed video to your sites. And you can make some cash.

Voxant
$6-8 average CPM on video

Using licensed, branded content on your site.

http://www.voxant.com/content/website_publishers.php

Voxant works with bloggers to show this content, 20% goes to bloggers.

Mochilla and Clip Syndicate are others.

Derek Miller asks about making your own video and uploading your video.

Revver
Metacafe

Vimio

Why does video look like crap online?
1. Way it’s served. YouTube is Lighting Cast.
2. How you save it and load it. 5 Essential Tips for Uploading Video to YouTube

Other tips:

* We love Blip.tv
* www.video.ca
* triggit extension with search box
* TriggitTube Mogul
* Dot Sub

Woke up late today but thankfully made it to Northern Voice at the UBC Forestry building in time to watch the scheduling–my favourite part of the un-conference.

1st session I’m attending is enterprise use of wikis, blogs and other social media.

* Strike a balance between depts., divisions is to know are we sharing with others? Be as open as possible from the beginning. Only lock down pages and things than need to be revealed later.

* Blogs and aggregated data shared by email, which is familiar to people. This helps people get used to blogs.

* No emails with attachments. Put it in the wiki. The statement is “we have these systems, let’s use them.”

* Simply rules–if it has an attachment, put it in the wiki. This is an easy, task-based rule. Think about linking.

* Make it easy early.

* Need grassroots pushing with management buy-in and support.

* The guy who wrote the lunch reviews became the star in the company and things took off from there.

* The “poke” tool made it work in another company.

* Top should harness the power of the people at the bottom.

* Don’t say it’s a wiki. Here’s a resources page. Here’s a website with links. Here’s a page to bookmark. Don’t freak people out.

* Wiki is not a weird magical thing. It’s just HTML.

* Wiki search is sometimes bad.

Great session. Interesting knowledge in the room.

Beware of strangeness.