Thousands of people are getting set to descend upon Banff over the coming week for nextMEDIA and the Banff TV Festival . There is a small team of us that will be covering both conferences online in such a way that has never quite been tackled before for this infamous week. We’ll be posting content on both festival sites with hopes to bring a little more digital media awareness and coverage to the people in attendance and also to provide somewhat of a highlight reel for those unable to be there. This online channel will include highlights from the sessions, written articles, the hottest pics and interviews with participants and delegates. A lot of what we’re doing involves user participation and will be that much more successful if more people contribute to the content.

Our lovely team consists of Erica Hargreave , Kris Krug , McLean MG , Kevin Fraser , Mark Greenspan and myself . Plus a few roaming photo reporters and a pro video team Status Firm . We’ll be hunting you all down and grabbing interviews wherever we can!

We’ve been planning this trek for a few months now and most of the pieces are in place, but we need you to participate to make this all happen beautifully. All content can be easily tagged so that it gets aggregated into the Festival Online Stream – calling all bloggers, photographers, delegates, Banff participants, hey, even producers and broadcasters: we know most of you are not likely twittering these days, but why not try it out?

Here’s how you can include your own content and whereabouts online on the Banff Channel:

BY MOBILE: Anyone with a Blackberry or laptop or other mobile device can submit photos and videos attachments – or just plain text posts too –  *without* creating an account – just by emailing either of the following:
nextMEDIA: nm08 AT sifttool DOT com
Banff TV Fest: bwtf08 AT sifttool DOT com

A NOTE ON TAGGING: All content tagged with "nm08" and "bwtv08" will get aggregated to the respective nextMEDIA and Banff sites. (Also tag your material with "nextmedia" and "banfftvfest".)

TWITTERING: Using the "#" (hash mark) and the appropriate tag to the event to feed all tweets into twemes , like so: "#nm08" or "#bwtf08"

FLICKR: Join the festivals’ Flickr groups and tag all of your photos with the festival tags "nm08" and "bwtf08" – nextMEDIA Flickr Group | Banff TV Fest Flickr Group

BLOGS: If you’re writing content on your own blog about the festival, send us your link to the category, like so: "http://megancole.org/category/nm08" OR "http://megancole.org/category/bwtf08" – send those links to nm08 AT sifttool DOT com and to bwtf08 AT sifttool DOT com, respectively.

YOUTUBES: Same goes for your own YouTube Channel – just send the category link for Banff content of your YouTube Channel to nm08 AT sifttool DOT com or bwtf08 AT sifttool DOT com, and you’ll be added into the channel that way as well.

Watch the front pages of both festival sites for updated content and the continuous stream of your content and ours!