As most of you probably already know, Northern Voice is just around the corner - it’s kicking off on Thursday night with an evening of fun and dancing at Fredrico’s Supper Club, followed by two days of what - in my opinion - is set to be one of the best blogging/ social media conferences in Canada this year.

What you may not know is that this year I’ve been involved with the organizing committee and I will be speaking on a panel. Prior to this year, I’d not been on an organizing committee for a conference and I had no idea exactly how much work was involved to put on an event this size. Added to this is the communities passionate and vocal interest in the conference - which is absolutely amazing. The team behind the conference are all passionate, busy, and ultimately dedicated to making Northern Voice a smashing success for the 5th year in a row. The other organizers behind Northern Voice this year are Alexa Booth, Brian Lamb, Cyprien Lomas, Dale McGladdery, James Sherrett,  Julie Szabo, Kris Krug, Lauren Wood, Lori Pike, Roland Talango, Shane Birley, and Travis Smith.

The panel I’m on is Who Are You? Defining Yourself in the Online World. I’m really excited about this panel, as I will be joined by some of my favorite Vancouver social media ladies - Nadia Nascimento, Rebecca Bollwitt, and Linda Bustos with Monica Hamburg moderating - which will be a full time job as the four of us can really get going.

The panel will discuss the various social networking sites that can be utilized to build your brand online, and identify advantages and pitfalls of these sites, their usage, and their relationship to one another. During the discussion, they will provide context for the growing significance of social networking for personal brands, as we discuss the paths each of us took in order to build our personal online reputations.

As well, we will go through the paths that we each took build our personal online reputations. Along with the steps that we would do differently if we were to do it over again. In the spirit of social media, we will end the panel by opening the floor for a group conversation.

Immediately following Northern Voice is Illuminate Yaletown - this event is unrelated to Northern Voice but looks like it will be a great way to end the conference. This event will be a great opportunity for everyone who attended PhotoCamp at Northern Voice to put their new skills to use.

Miss604 - who also happens to be on my Northern Voice panel has done a great review of the event. The event takes place from 5:29pm to 9:29pm in Yaletown’s heritage district (Hamilton and Mainland between Davie and Nelson) everyone is invited to come and enjoy light installations, music, colour-changing helium orbs, light graffiti, fire breathing and many other dazzling displays.

As the only outdoor event to take place in Vancouver at this time of year, this event will bring light to a gloomy night. Featuring light installations developed by artists and architects, cutting edge music and interactive activities, illuminate yaletown will allow attendees to see Vancouver as it has never been experienced before. [Yaletown]

6S Marketing is a sponsor of the event and we will be putting on a light show from our office. We’re located at 402-1120 Hamilton Street, near the intersection at Helmcken Street. So if you make it out to Illuminate Yaletown, make sure you keep an eye out for our display. We’re helping to put together the 2009 Illuminate Yaletown Photo Contest that is being hosted on Flickr. More than $500 in cash and Yaletown restaurant gift certificates are available to be won for online photo entries including best photos by popular vote, best photos by judges selection, as well as “best collection” “fastest uploads.” So make sure you bring your cameras and add your pics to the flickr group.

This Friday, I’m heading down to the Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas.  I’m super excited to be going and I have one of Invoke’s social media marketing clients tagga to thank for sending me down there.  I’ve been heading tagga’s Social Media Marketing campaign since they launched this summer and we’ve been running several cool campaigns for them.  The most interesting and fun by far though, are the campaigns that are revolving around Blogworld.

Over the three days at blogworld, tagga is going to be throwing 8 taggamobs. Once you get there, we’re going to give you something fun to do and the winners will walk away with cool swag and prizes. The first two taggamobs are going to be held at the TechSet party at Bare where tagga has a cabana, so make sure you are there!

If you’re heading to Blogworld, make sure you follow tagga on twitter and text ‘tagga’ to 82442. Also, if you want to get mobile updates on the taggamob’s, make sure you subscribe to mobile on the tagga blog - this way you’ll know before everyone else when and where the next taggamob will be held!

We have tons of cool prizes lined up to give out - I get to feel like Santa at Christmas all weekend - ending with a grand prize of a $500 Apple GC.  I’ll give you a huge hint now, in order to win the grand prize, you’re going to have to answer a riddle.  I’ll be dropping hints throughout the weekend on the tagga mobile RSS (make sure you subscribe to mobile on the tagga blog) and through the tagga twitter account.

In exactly 7 hours from now I will begin participating in the first annual Vancouver blogathon for charity.  For 24, starting at 10 pm tonight and ending 10 pm tomorrow night, I will be writing and posting a blog post every 30 minutes.  That works out to 49 posts in total.  I’m participating in the blogathon through work and will be posting on the Invoke blog.

I’ve already written a bunch of the posts and have had colleagues at work chip in by writing some for me as well.  There are some great posts that will be posted and a few that are funny.  They are definitely worth heading over and checking out.

I am doing all of this to help raise money for a small village in West Mali.  Through the Lochmaddy Foundation, all donations will be directed to N’Gouraba. Families in N’Gouraba are working hard to improve their lives and the lives of their children through a special agricultural project. Your donation will empower and enable them to realize increased crops, more family income with new opportunities and a brighter future.

So far, we have raised $1,346.  There is still time to get donations in and any little bit you can help with will go along way in a village like N’Gouraba.  Visit Invoke’s page on Plan Canada to make your donation.

This week has been a particularly busy one.  It is my last week at bootcamp - tomorrow we are redoing our measurements and fitness test and  I’ll post the results and the overall inches lost.  I’ve already noticed a huge difference in my stamina and overall muscle tone.  So much so, that I’ve already signed up for another month.  It starts on Monday - so no break for me, but well worth it.

At work, we like to do off’s.  We started with a soup off, then progressed to a slow cooker off - which we aptly named Rock Out with Your Crock Out.  That one was so good, that we did it twice - the mix of slow cookers and guitar hero is amazingly fun.  To celebrate the final arrival of summer in our fair little city, we’ve decided to do a BBQ off.  As I type, I am parboiling some ribs and am about to make a BBQ sauce to marinate them in over night.

Yesterday, I signed Invoke up for the 2008 24 hour blogathon for charity. Basically, we will be posting a blog post every 30 minutes for 24 hours. This year, the blogathon was arranged by Vancouver’s very own Miss604 and the last time I checked, there were 12 bloggers signed up.  I know Vancouver can do a lot better than this and I encourage any bloggers out there to participate.  I will be writing in Invoke’s blog for the event if you would like to check it out during the event.  The Invoke team with begin posting at 10 pm July 26, and we will upload our last post at 10 pm July 27.

We’ve chosen a charity that helps villages in Mali.  I will have more information on the charity and an actual page where you can donate tomorrow.  It’s going to a great cause, so any bit that you can help with would be much appreciated.

**Update:

Invoke has set a fund raising goal of $1000 for the blogathon.  If you would like to support our efforts - which we would greatly appreciate - you can make a donation to the cause here (the page will be going live later today).  Invoke has chosen a charity that is very close to Invoke’s heart - The Lochmaddy Foundation.  Invoke is connected to this charity through Dario Meli and David Tedman who sit on the board. Through the Lochmaddy Foundation, all donations will be directed to a community in Mali, West Africa. Families in N’Gouraba are working hard to improve their lives and the lives of their children through a special agricultural project. Your donation will empower and enable them to realize increased crops, more family income with new opportunities and a brighter future.

We are collecting donations through Plan Canada who are our partner on the ground there.  I would like to thank them and specifically Heather for all of their hard work in helping Invoke bring this all together.

Yesterday I spent the day driving up to Banff for the nextMEDIA conference with Dario - and when I say all day I really do mean all day, we spent at least 10 hours in the car driving up here.  But it was worth it, BC is beautiful, actually that word does not describe it, breathtaking is a far better adjective.  The only downside of the drive, was the constant rain.  And!!! I finally got to see the Rockies from below 10,000 feet.  They are simply awesome - although I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a sign saying that we’d entered the mountain range.  I guess that the big swath of mountains should have been enough of a hint though.

I noticed something on the drive up here.  People in BC are really bad at naming things.  Sometimes they were just boring, used or kinda stupid and other times I’m not quite sure how they missed the innuendo that went along with their name.  We had The Golden Rim, Skunk Cabbage Trail - OK I seem to have forgotten most of them after a nice full nights sleep - but, I’ll catch and write them down on the way down so that I can update this.  Although, my favorite was a billboard for a medieval theme park - the sign read “2 Adventures, 1 Stop”.  Dario and I spent a good 5 min giggling over that one (if you don’t know what I’m referring to, I will not submit you to it, but it involves a couple of girls and a cup).

I’ll update this post tonight once the days festivitites have ceased.   I now must find some coffee.