Vancouver’s first annual blogathon for charity is set to start 10 pm Friday, July 26 and will finish 9 pm Sunday, July 28. There are three shifts that blogs could sign up for and Invoke – memelabs parent company – has signed up for the Sunshine Shift – 10 pm Friday to 10 pm Saturday. This may be the first Vancouver specific blogathon, but it flows from a long tradition of blogathons. When the people who organized the previous blogathons could not organize it this year, Rebecca – Miss604 – stepped in and organized this years event.

Last year, Vancouver was represented by Rebecca and Raul, but Vancouver has really stepped up to the plate this year and as of the time I wrote this post, there are 13 Vancouver bloggers signed up - check out the list. There is still a week to sign up and I highly encourage all the Vancouver bloggers that haven’t signed up yet to do so.

A blogathon is a 24-hour period when you write a blog post every 30 minutes for a good cause. Yes, you read that right – we will be posting 48 blog posts! I’ve put the word out here and our team members have really stepped up to the plate – yes 48 posts from me may have gotten a bit boring. Thus far, Nadia Nascimento, David Tedman, Dario Meli, Ryan Holmes, Andre Liem, Murat Ayfer, James Wilson, and our very own bacon chocolate chip cookie baking Zuri Scrivens have volunteered to write at least one post. This list will most likely grow as the actual date grows closer.

Invoke has set a fund raising goal of $3000 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 our hearts 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.

**Update: Dario told me that I need to inform you all that these pics were all taken from my iphone that work gave me for Christmas

This was the first year that I’ve attended Northern Voice and I have to say it’s the best conference I’ve been to. I was only able to make it to the Friday sessions or MooseCamp (thanks to Boris Mann for letting me come to the Friday even though the tickets had sold out well in advance) and I’m still kicking myself for forgetting to buy a ticket to the Saturday sessions. After a dazed and confused call to the office asking them to Google maps some directions as I was beyond lost trying to navigate my way around UBC, I managed to find the venue. It was at the UBC Forestry Science Center on Main Mall (and unlike the name implies Main Mall is not a main street, hence the frantic call to the office for directions – have I mentioned that I love Google Maps).

The day started bright and early with more than a couple of bleary eyed attendants who’d had too much fun the night before at the Tiki Dinner. Once caffeine had been imbibed and people started to perk up, we started the day with some human graphing. Questions were shouted out and we formed orderly lines – as Canadians are apt to do – that corresponded to each participants answer. It was really interesting to see where people fell in relation to the questions – they ranged from when you started blogging to how many times do you link out in your blog posts.

Once the games were over, Boris started the morning scrum to plan the sessions for the day. I really loved how Northern Voice handled the organization of conference speakers. On the conference wiki, anyone could sign up to give a talk on the subject of their choosing and if you missed this opportunity to sign up, you were able to announce your topic at this time. As Boris shouted out the session topics, anyone who wanted to attend a given session raised their hands and time slots and rooms were given out accordingly. From this we planned our day and were off to the first sessions.

The first session that I went to was “Being a Blogging Network Backed Blogger” presented by David Peralty from Splashpress Media, this session strayed off of the initial focus and became a discussion on how to monetize a blog. I was sitting with Tod Maffin of the CBC in this session and he was keeping a twitter count of the number of times that ‘monitize’ was said during the presentation – we counted 14.

Instead of going to the next session like a good conference goer should, I decided to play hooky with Phillip Jeffery and Beth Snow (who wore the best knee high boots in the place) and I grabbed a Venti extra hot non-fat vanilla americano misto (I dare you to try and say that 3 times fast) mmm tasty.

The next session was “Using virtual collaborative spaces in a heavily-managed, locked-down world” presented by Bonnie Johnston. This was a discussion on problems encountered in heavily regulated environments and the solutions that people who have worked in these environments have come up with. My partner in crime in this session was Phillip Jeffery pictured to the left.

We were then off to a much needed lunch break – my caffeine high from the morning Starbucks jaunt was beginning to wear off. We dined on tasty sandwiches and I stole borrowed Beth’s computer and updated her twitter feed to tell everyone that she was eating tasty cheese morsels for lunch – this took 3 twitter updates in total. Lunch also gave me a chance to scope out the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptops that were at the conference. They were even more awesome in person than they are on the internet, I love their shrekesque look and the idea behind them.

After lunch I stopped by the Photocamp session and learned more in 20 minutes about photography that I’d learned since I got my first digital camera. My favorite bit from this session was Rachael Ashe’s – light painting. This process allows you to take absolutely breathtaking pictures.

The last session of the day for me was the one that I was looking forward to the most. It was Megan Cole‘s “Social Media Mecca“. We were to meet in one of the smaller rooms, but there were so many of us and the weather was more than unseasonably awesome, that we moved the session to the grass courtyard. It was great to meet some many other Social Media Marketers in Vancouver. With the sun shining upon us and a couple of dog blankets hastily pulled from cars, we got a really good conversation started on the state of social media in Vancouver and ways in which to create a trusted community of social media marketers in Vancouver. I think that this gathering will be the first amongst many in the future.

I didn’t make it to Saturday, but from everyone that I’ve spoken to and from what I’ve read, it was another fabulous day. Read more about Northern Voice here and see some great pictures here. I’d like to thank Boris and all of the volunteers (who were decked out in awesome sheriff badges) for all the hard work that they put in to make this conference the phenomenal success it was and I can’t wait till Northern Voice 2009 when I will ensure that I have tickets to the whole darn thing.