Northern Voice was Canada’s first blogging conference and has sold out every year it’s been around (four years now).  Missed last year and it looks like I’ll miss this year as well:
Once again, Northern Voice is sold out. I always find it a little remarkable when that happens, as we have a marketing budget of precisely zero dollars and zero cents. Plus, all of us organizers are busy people. We barely have enough time to organize the conference essentials, let alone promote it. Source: Northern Voice Sold Out, and Another Great Basco5 Poster
I wonder if a few spaces might open …read more

Marshall Kirkpatrick and I were chatting tonight and he mentioned the new WP theme called “Prologue” that has some very Twitter-like features.  We were also both musing how we were sitting chatting at DEMO while other folks were blogging it.  Of course if you can’t be first–be smarter (I think Marshall might beat me in that department tonight).
From the WP.com blog, Matt let us know about this new theme and what it could be used for:
Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally …read more

Great, great news this morning that Automattic received an investment, and the Gray Lady herself is one of the investors, of $29.5 million to build their business even more.  I like to see these reasonable amounts of funding.  Sure it’s a lot of money, but it also costs a lot to build a business as complex as what they are doing.  Just some of the coverage and kudos I read this morning about the investment:

WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M – GigaOM
» Open source business model reaching tipping point | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
Automattic Raises $29.5M Series B Round, New York …read more

The Crunchies were given out on Friday and the complete winners list was put up on Saturday.  Congrats, of course, go out to all of the winners, but there are a few winners who I want to give special attention to:
Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme.Founded and developed solely by Gabe Rivera, Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.
Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)
Schnieder has lead the company from its roots as a open source alternative to Movable Type into …read more