I posted my thoughts about WineCamp and NetSquared, in retrospective, over at the Web of Change site.

This here is the link that you'll need...

Since I haven't posted anything here recently, I thought I might as well direct you thataways... And while it keeps you busy, I'll try and come up with some compelling content. (Funny that San Francisco filled me with so much to feverishly blog about. Life in Vancouver can't be *that* much less interesting, can it?)

Click on the link above and you'll be transported to the Geek Entertainment media empire, where you can watch the latest episode with yours truly. You'll see me cruising around the NetSquared social with a glass of wine, asking people tricky questions like "What is the square root of net?" and "What was the last thing you looked up on Wikipedia?"

You'll be surprised and delighted by some of their answers. I swear.

(Cross-posted from http://netsquared.org/blog)

So the past hour or so has been a meeting and melding of minds, as geeks of all stripes gathered in small groups to hammer through projects together. Seth got newbies blogging, there was a group talking about Tagging to Save the World, the Drupal geeks gathered to do their thing (this happens all over the world, every time more than two of them get together), some folks Mashed Up some maps, others talked about Microformats (I finally found out what those are), some people got initiated into the Cult of Second Life (I checked it out, but my feelings about video games run deep. I'm sorry.), Rolf demonstrated the new Melt social networking tool for climate change action, and I can't remember what else. There was more! Much more!

So Yoga for Geeks was not on the agenda for NetSquared. 

But then late yesterday I was asked whether I'd like to offer a "Tips and Tricks" session for people to come around and drop into, and I agreed. Other offerings were things like "Tuning Your MySql Database", "CSS Tips" and "How to Blog", so I figured a space for a little bit of stretching out would be welcomed. ;) It's been an intense couple of days, after all.

It was quite different from what other YFG sessions have been, as this one was not a class per-se, but rather just people coming and going and asking about sore spots and trying things out on the fly. It turned into a bit of a "skill-share" actually, with everyone exchanging tricks for combatting desk fatigue. I got some great new ideas for future sessions  – thanks to those who came out!

We did some work with chairs, and some stuff on the floor. We stretched our wrists, necks, shoulders, backs, and even our eyeballs. And then... (this was sheer brilliance)... someone had the idea of doing a little massage circle. Oooh, it was great. Look for that one at many future Yoga for Geeks sessions!

I'm blogging live from the session on distributed grassroots marketing at NetSquared. The speakers are Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, Chris Messina, and it's being moderated by Marnie Webb. I'm definitely not catching everything and it won't all be totally correct but I hope you'll forgive me and find it useful anyway. :)

Only 8 days until I fly to California – it's been pretty much a year since my last visit and oh am I excited. (For those who don't know, I spent four months down there early last year, near Santa Cruz, and I miss the place. I loooove California.)

It's going to be a whirlwind of a week, I'm realizing. I arrive early Thursday morning, and will probably spend Thursday and Friday in San Francisco. Looks like I'll be spending the weekend at WineCamp, though I haven't yet registered and I'm fearful of geek-overload. I think it would be lovely to spend a fun weekend with cool people I'd like to meet, talking about social change and geekery, but I fear that combined with NetSquared the following week, my brain might turn to mush. Who knows, though. Maybe I'll just blast off into a different dimension of zen-ness with my laptop. Or maybe I'll spend the weekend having fun with real people and won't feel like it was a geek-out? That sounds wonderful.

I'm hoping to squeeze in a night at Mount Madonna, where I used to live, but that'll be tight, since NetSquared starts on Tuesday. And I'm excited. I'll be wearing a couple of hats – my Web of Change conference coordinator hat, and my DeSmogBlog Community Manager hat. Eager to recruit new WOCers, and eager to get great advice on how to help the Blog go next-level!

I've been poking through the session offerings at the site. I have a feeling it's going to be a 48-hour case of FOMS – Fear Of Missing Something. But some of the sessions that sound interesting to me are:

• Gender and the social web: new tools, same...stuff?

• From a Voice in the Wilderness to the Wisdom of Crowds: Citizen Journalism, Nonprofit Organizations and Social Change

• Social networking systems - chat rooms on steroids or a real tool for social change?

• The distributed grass roots marketing team... letting your community, advocates, evangelists, and fans do the heavy lifting

• I tag the hand that feeds me: examining aggregation and tagging in the nonprofit world

Phew. Participants have been encouraged to comment and add thoughts and questions to the topics... so far I'm feeling too overwhelmed by my actual obligations to get into it. But I think I'll try and contribute something in the next week.

So that's it from me... watch for an exciting announcement in the next day or two. Okay, it's probably more exciting to me than it is to the general public. But I'm *stoked*.