BlogHer Summed Up
Here's the problem with BlogHer. We've spent the better part of today trying to document what happened, what we think it all means and what impressions we got from the event. Okay, fine. But then in doing so we're looking for links to give you and going to the liveblogs to try to verify some of the quotes and other notes we took down.
Five hours later, we emerge from a daze - we've been following link after link, looking at photos and generally just getting really caught up in the actual blogs of the conference's participants. Not just what they had to say about BlogHer but also delving deep into archives to get to know these women.
And that, very simply, is the point.
BlogHer was impressive - a packed conference, with significant sponsorship, put together in about four months. Sessions ranged from the basics of blogging to how to make money from blogging. Smaller sessions, called "Birds of a Feather" let participants gather in more intimate groups, with no official leader, to talk about whatever topic most interested them, whether that be digital identities, photoblogging, obscentities in blogging, and many more. If you couldn't find one that interested you, you were free to start your own on the spot.
Some statistics we were given in the opening session: 80% of the attendees are women, 20% men (see how we did the math there for you?); 11% are students. More than half the people there were from outside the Bay Area and 52% had never gone to a conference or event about blogging before.
The first general session, a debate between Charlene Li and Halley Suitt, moderated by Lisa Stone, was about how to get women bloggers noticed, starting off with a debate about whether we should care about this at all - do links, traffic and rankings like the Technorati 100 really matter? We'd learned earlier that 75% of the attendees cared about traffic and links, so they must think this is the way to go but ideas coming out of that session were around creating more "communities" (never really definied, but we got the idea that people were taking about types of blogs or types of content) and creating links and communities that are more meaningful and maybe more qualitatively judged. One person's A-list would certainly be different than another's and if you care about an A-list it should be one that is relevant to you.
Since we were talking about the "Rules of the Game" - if you wanted to play the game, what are the rules? Charlene Li outlined them: First, you must network and the way to do it is to both tell people what you need and tell people what you can give. Second, you must be relevant. Third, you must be unique.
Suitt said that if you wanted links, then you have to ask for them - and you often have to do it more than once. One of the audience members said that ultimately links and traffic may not be your goal and they're rarely the end goal itself. You need to define your goal and, if traffic is the way to get it, then you have to go after it. Our favourite suggestion was from Mark Canter, that we have to make our own lists, "Do what you gotta do. Tell the men to fuck off."
After the first session, we broke into our Birds of a Feather sessions - small breakout groups around various topics. We headed for "Digital Identity" and spoke to other bloggers who are struggling with how and where to create boundaries for themselves online - and even whether such boundaries should exist at all. Some of the ideas and issues thrown out here would emerge again later in a bigger session "How to Get Naked".
Next up we got our choice of five group sessions and opted to go to Advanced Tools - hoping to learn some cool new tricks. While the entire conference location was wired for wifi, there were problems throughout the day with people connecting to it. This caused particular stresses for some of the livebloggers and wreaked havoc on this particular session (not to mention that probably 1/3 of the attendees were toting a laptop and you could almost feel the withdrawal shakes reverberate through a room when connections were scarce). To their credit the presenters (Alexandra Samuel, George Oates and Marnie Webb) worked around it as much as possible and by employing the time-honoured tradition of Q&A and a flipchart, we thought people were able to learn something or at least come away with some URLs to investigate further (they should show up on the session's blog). We imagine that representatives of about every tool being discussed were at the session so questions could almost always be answered. And the session attendees got an unintentional scoop from Mena Trott that Typepad intends to release Typelists with RSS feeds next week. (Completely aside, we're bummed we didn't talk to Mena not because we wanted to schmooze but because we wanted to know where she got her fabulous necklace!) Given the popularity of this session we hope that more "technical tools" kinds of sessions are given more schedule space in 2006.
During lunch, there was a general session panel discussion on "Flame, Blame and Shame" about how to deal with aggression online and whether it was different coming from men vs. women. Two of the comments that we saw that we think particularly relevant were from Deb Jones who said that you have to develop a Terms of Use policy for your blog (we know that from experience!) and from Heather Armstrong who said that her own experience was that the technology couldn't keep up with her readership and how overwhelming it was to moderate her comments to protect her readers. That smells like a challenge to us!
The day after lunch was crammed with three blocks of smaller sessions. We chose "How to Get Naked" (which was packed as expected), "Suffragette Journalists: Op-Ed Pages of Our Own" (also quite popular) and "MommyBlogging" to end the day. Our notes get pretty scanty after lunch as we started to feel a bit draggy.
How to Get Naked was about identity blogging and how do you manage your online identity and deal with how others are responding to it. The panelists, Heather Armstrong, Koan Bremner and Ronni Bennett are great examples of women who've figuratively been naked to their readers and they were unanimous in saying that it's been an overwhelmingly positive experience for them. Yes, they had some concerns about how what they write would be received by both the world and by the people who know them offline, but, as Koan said "If you out yourself, no one can do it to you." They were also all unanimous in saying that it's important to set your limits and boundaries and not to exceed them, even if it's tempting. Not everything has to be documented, but what you document should be as true as you can make it.
At the Suffragette Journalists session, the panelists debated the notion of "citizen journalism" and it's merits. Chris Nolan argued that just by telling a story about what happened to them, a blogger isn't a journalist; being a journalist is about more than that. But there are instances where what the blogger is saying can be news, like in the case of another panelist, Evelyn Rodriguez, who was in Thailand during the tsunami and write about it in her blog and gained some notice for it. Chris said that "Newsgathering is ubiquitous; it's out of the newsroom." Another part of the discussion turned to what traditional media is doing (or not doing) with blogging and how, most people agreed, they really were clueless. This lead to some ideas about how one could pitch to a newspaper (advice from Barbara Serrano of the LA Times on how to pitch) and eventually a suggestion from Jay Rosen that maybe bloggers should offer to be "the blogger" for their local newspapers so they don't just get some mediocre staff writers to do it, poorly, and then present that as (bad) blogging.
Our final session was a big of a lark - MommyBlogging. It turned out to be one of the best sessions. MommyBloggers are often denegrated (and dealt with some of that at BlogHer itself) but are some of the most honest identity bloggers around, struggling constantly with some of the issues at the forefront of privacy. And more than any of the other sessions, this was a group of women who really supported one another and cheered each other on.
By this time we were pretty well cooked but the day wasn't over yet. After an injection of sugar (cooooookies) and caffiene we had one more session left in us - thankfully also the last of the day.
The closing session was designed to create the "Mother of all To-Do Lists" and allow participants to say that they most got out of the day and what they intended to bring home with them and work on in their own blogs. While I'm not sure a definitive list really came out, attendees were very positive about their experience and seemed motivated to take their blogs a step further in a number of directions.
Finally, cocktails! A last chance for networking and meeting people with whom you've wanted some face time. Thanks to the social graces of Niall Kennedy we were able to track down friend of SFist, Ginevra Kirkland, and, we guess we could say cousin of SFist, Rebecca Walters (of DCist). Then it was off to dinner where we ran into party crasher and general troublemaker Min Jung Kim and were fed and sung into a stupor before calling it an early night and letting the really hardcore bloggers carry on without us.
The entire day was infused with great energy - the kind you get when you bring together people who feel they have something to say and know that other people want to listen to them. A great part of what BlogHer offered was access and networking. If you were a blogger who wanted something - links, advice, a contact or a tutorial - you could probably find someone there who could give it to you. It offered a level playing field for all attendees, you could do with it what you wanted and you could get out of it (it's a "do-ocracy") whatever you had the guts to put into it.
If we have any criticisms, they are decidedly minor and mostly logistical: in trying to offer a conference for (and by) women, the specific event offerings were quite broad, maybe trying to do too much in too short a time frame. Afterall, it was a one day conference appealing to an incredibly wide range of interests. Time management was a bit of a problem - putting so much into a single day where participants were encouraged to not just ask questions, but help solve them and speak about their experiences meant that sessions sometimes ran long or got cut off abruptly.
Also, and we almost can't believe we're saying this, is that the technology at times seemed to get in the way of the content (though maybe that isn't that shocking as it does seem sort of a blogging disease). By the end of the day we were pretty sure had we have to hear much more clacking of keyboards while a panelist was talking we were going to go apeshit. And we think the audioblogging of the content will be valuable but the constant fiddling with microphones was a drag. As sometimes happens with blogging, the rush to "get it all down" and be sure it was recorded in the ether can take away from the real heart of discussion.
We're sure that for BlogHer 2006 these glitches will be worked out and we're looking forward to an even better second time out.
Photos by Whitney Brandt.