The land of the ice and snow

Well, that might be exaggerating a little considering the time of year, but as per the old Led Zeppelin classic, I’m off to the land of the midnight sun tomorrow for a event being held in Helsinki, Finland. I was invited, along with 34 others, to participate in the Nokia Open Lab 2008, a series of workshops discussing social media, community, and the mobile web of the future.

If you’re interested in reading more about it, I’ve blogged in a little more detail on my personal blog, and there’s a more high-level overview over on the Taunt Media blog. If you’re really interested in what I’m going to be up to, you can follow my activities while I’m away on both Twitter and Flickr. The workshop attendees, which include local Vancouver boys Roland Tanglao and Jason Hui (the latter of whom i’ll be flying with for most of the trip), have also put together a wiki of our activities and a Flickr group to host our photos for the week, which has been pretty handy in getting everyone organized.

Nokia Europe & WOMWorld (the co-sponsors of the event) were kind enough to provide me with a shiny new Nokia E71 for the duration of my trip, too, so I’ll be messing with that for the next few days.

It’ll be a whirlwind trip, as I leave tomorrow (Wednesday) and come back on Sunday (and I’m off all of next week in New York for the Web 2.0 Expo, too), so you probably won’t be hearing much out of me for the next few days. I’ll just have to trust you all to behave yourselves in the meantime, right? :)