These days, I'm thrilled to see that blogging conferences now include the three de-facto methods of communication: text, audio, and video.

This is where we should be.

As some of you might now, my corporate hat comes out when I leave a conference. I want action items. I insist on making a personal list of deliverables that are directly related to what I learned at a gathering like Northern Voice.

This conference had a good number of people new to everything bloggy. This is refreshing. I'm giving a "What's a Blog" talk in a couple weeks, and I love how it changes ever-so-slightly as blogging history is written.

What I learned most from the conference wasn't about blogging or RSS or audio and video---most likely because I'm a multimedia blogger. What I did learn was about people, culture, and families.

Before this trip to Vancouver, I had never been outside of the U.S. While this might seem a big surprising, I must remind you that I live in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley region. Virtually everything I've ever needed to deal with, happens here (if not in California).

Canada is different. It's another country, complete with all the subtle differences that make it so apparent to me while interacting with some basic level of life. I started thinking about how I write. Obviously, this is the Internet, and we reach the world when we put our words, sights and sounds on the screen. As someone who is a citizen of the U.S. (although I'll tell you I'm Californian above all), I can see how easy it is to forget about the rest of the world.

My personal theory, however, has to do more with keeping up with the European enormity and differences of and in the United States, and less with lack of caring about the rest of the world. As a Californian, I try.

Action item #1: Pay more attention to how my words translate to other languages, and be clear when referring to things I might take for granted. Not everyone knows what a Guitar Center is, for example.

The next notable items comes from the amount of families I met. One of the best experts on this is Julie Leung, who had her clan in tow. She has since posted her observations on children at the conference, as well as her general thoughts about going to Vancouver.

Beyond all the great conversations about blogging, podcasting, videoblogging and such, I had the best time while sitting on the floor of a dim sum restaurant stamping hearts, ladybugs, and happy faces on the hands of the various offspring of Marc and Lisa and Ted and Julie.

It was at that very brunch at Victoria's restaurant, where the idea for engaging kids with videoblogs came from. It's happening now and took little effort---but lots of inspiration.

So that's what I got out of Northern Voice. Not only did I get to visit a fantastic city; not only did I get to meet people I'v never met face-to-face (like Suw, Boris, Mack, Jeremy, Tod and many others), but I got to learn much more about a wacky and delightful harmony between blogging and people than I ever had before.

Oh yeah, and I get to teach Phil Wolff how to videoblog. :-)