regional blogging conference

I read about this new blogging conference Northern Voice held in Vancouver, BC on the blogs of fellow islanders Julie Leung and Ted Leung. Tempting.

It's great to see online communities acting as catalysts for face-to-face friendships.

It might be cool to do a mash-up of Google maps with bloggers so that everyone can see their proxity to each other. You could also build identity profiles to link yourself in to other groups, like book groups, discussion groups, etc. Perhaps Google Earth already has this feature?

(BTW: If you haven't tried it, Google Earth is now available for the Mac. It is simply awesome software.)