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 up for folks showing up at the door.  If you’re in Vancouver next week you should try.  In fact, if my travel plans to go to Vegas week after next bring me to Vancouver, I might just try myself.  If nothing else to go to MooseCamp and chat with friends.

Lloyd Budd has a great MooseCamp session in the works and, btw, Matt Mullenweg is keynoting at Northern Voice too.

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 interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to. For WordPress.com users the theme is available in your “Presentation” section. From the WordPress.com blog

Matt is being too modest.  Maybe too cagey.  But really I think this brings something us that Twitter lacks–affinity groups.  Yes, I know Pownce has them, but man are they hard to manage.  Imagine this, you have a descent-sized company.  You don’t really want to use Twitter for everything, but man it’s useful for a lot of things isn’t it?  What if you had a WPMU-based blog for the company … okay maybe just WP.  But you have blogs with different groups … HR, IT, General, For Sale, etc.  You just leave your comment on each of these blogs … heck you wouldn’t have to even contribute to any or all of these blogs, just follow the RSS feeds.  Pretty darn powerful.

Allen Stern, I think, is on the right track with his post:

With Wordpress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer. What makes it interesting? Check out the final comment by Matt in the announcement, “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 interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to. For WordPress.com users the theme is available in your “Presentation” section.” “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey goodbye” Says WordPress To Twitter | CenterNetworks

Now…I think I need to test this somewhere.

Other folks talking about this: Mathew Ingram, Mashable

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 Times Joins In - ReadWriteWeb
• Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress.com, Raises $29.5 Million– bub.blicio.us
• A Fool’s Wisdom » We Raised $29.5 Million!
• Photo Matt » Act Two
• Wordpress lands a whopper - - mathewingram.com/work
• Automattic secures $29.5 million B round « Mark on WordPress
• Automattic for the Money ($29.5M to be Exact) | Mark Evans
• Automattic fundraising « Toni’s Garage

I echo Dan Farber’s sentiment that this gives the whole open-source business model serious credibility.  The fact that WP has taken off so fast (really if you think about it) and has been adopted by many large organizations (like b5media–all our blogs are on WP), is a testament to WP’s power, flexibility and stability.

Again, kudos to Matt, Toni, and the whole Automattic team.

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 a multi-million dollar enterprise that saves the world from blog spam and offers a free hosted blogging solution that competes with Google’s Blogger.

Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress)

The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service.

Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million Source: 2007 Crunchies: The Winners

Gabe Rivera has done something great with Techmeme.  It might not be perfect, even Gabe sees that, but it is my source for finding the best conversations on the hot topics.  I generally know what the hot topic du jour is, but it’s who is chiming in and saying what that I use Techmeme for.

Automattic, well I’m a huge fan.  Congrats to all my friends as Automattic, Lloyd, Matt, Donncha, and especially Toni for pulling in the Best Startup CEO award!

StumbleUpon, before it was scooped up by eBay, was based in Calgary, so I have to give props to them.

With this kind of recognition, I wonder what is coming up for both Techmeme and Automattic.  Sure I could guess, but what fun would that be?  I’ll just have to see if I can dig up some tips.  Maybe DEMO in a couple weeks will give me some ideas.

Photo of Mike Arrington, Toni, and Matt by Scott Beale