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BlogHer Conference ’05: what fun!

April 30th, 2005 · 4 Comments

The BlogHer Conference ’05 was officially announced for July 30 in Santa Clara, CA on blogher.org earlier this month.

BlogHer Conference ’05 will provide an open, inclusive forum to:

1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community
2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics
3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide

Here’s why I’m excited:

  • The advisory board listed on the blog side bar is an amazing group of women. I’ve already met a few of them and I’d love to meet the rest. Directed by these women, this conference will be fun and powerful!
  • The community coming together. It’s great to see bloggers supporting each other, contributing and making it happen in big and little ways. Wow! Nancy White noted this collaboration beginning.
  • Different voices! Nancy and dana boyd are plotting how to bring different voices to BlogHer. Reading through the comments on the BlogHer site and in Elisa Camahort’s del.icio.us bloghercon feed, I am hearing voices and meeting bloggers new to me, traveling around the country and world. How exciting! I’ve started adding some new feeds to my aggregator, thanks to the reading I’ve done for BlogHer.
  • New ideas! The Room of Your Own, opportunity for anyone to create and lead a session, is an excellent idea. I’m eager to hear what happens and who chooses to take advantage of this rich possibility. Volunteer Blogherships are another creative way of opening the doors for more to enter. The Birds of a Feather networking ideas sound fun and practical. The organizers seem to be simply facilitating what others desire, asking for feedback and soliciting suggestions.
  • How to be naked will be another rich discussion as others I have enjoyed in the past. It’s a hot topic, an intense topic, and one that has been powerful at previous blogging conferences so I imagine it will have a great effect with the community of Bloghers. How much of ourselves we choose to reveal in our blogs, the difference between our public and private selves, is an issue I’ve explored in the Emotional Life of Weblogs session at BloggerCon III, in my session at Northern Voice on Making Masks in February and in the talk I’m preparing for Gnomedex 5.0. The lines we draw, the shapes we make, the way we hide or share ourselves feeds back into our identity and helps us in the bridges we build to others. I believe too that there are aspects of this discussion that are particular to women, as has been pointed out in the comments. For example, we may be more likely to try to share from our relationships and personal lives, yet at the same time we may be more concerned for safety and privacy.

    Reading through the session discussions reveals many great ideas. Besides the sessions themselves, I like the connections that are made at conferences from being together in the same room and hanging out during meals. Many of my closest relationships in blogs were cemented at conferences. I imagine BlogHer Conference will have many of the same opportunities.

    So I’ve described why I am excited about BlogHer Conference ’05. It’s taken me a while to write this post. The past few weeks have been busy for our family and with much on my plate, I haven’t been blogging at my usual pace. But I’ve also taken my time to write this post because I didn’t want to write it. I didn’t want to say I can’t make it.

    BlogHer Conference ’05 will take place July 30 in Santa Clara, California. I would like to be there. We have a few friends in the area so I could probably find a place to stay and when I looked at airfares from Seattle to San Jose last night, the cost was down to $200. However, before BlogHer Conference was announced, we had made other commitments of our limited family resources. Also, the date is too close to OSCON (August 1 – 5) for our family’s comfort. Ted and I try to avoid playing tag-team parenting, the exchanging of kids and kisses at the airport gates.

    But never say never. I’m leaving open the possibility that perhaps something will work out last minute and I’ll be able to go. For now I think I should plan on staying at home and participating on-line as I can.

    However, simply because I’m not attending doesn’t mean anyone else has to miss it: Go to BlogHer Conference ’05!

    bathroomlipstick.jpg

    And please write a post or two to share the goodies . 🙂

    Thanks to the organizers and advisory board of BlogHer for all the work they have done so far!

    *******

    Bonus links on gender issues:

    Lisa Dusseault: I’m concerned about conferences with serious gender imbalances…

    Amanda Witt: On Boys and Bikinis.

    • Tags: blog

    4 responses so far ↓

    • 1 Elisa Camahort // Apr 30, 2005 at 7:20 am

      Oh no! I’m so disappointed you can’t make it!

      But thanks so much for the long, glowing post…and I’m so glad you’ve been checking out our site and the conversations there. Frankly I’ve been pretty blown away by the quantity and quality of comments we’re getting there. Gee, it seems like if you ask people what they think these bloggy folks speak up!

      Well, I’m just going to hope against hope something miraculously works out, because I was hoping to meet you in person.

    • 2 Nancy White // Apr 30, 2005 at 11:46 am

      Julie, if not in body, then in spirit, eh? I commit to actively blogging out and hopefully we’ll also have an IRC channel to bring voices in. If we look at the intent and potential community of BlogHer, then the F2F is just one punctuation point over a larger lifecycle of interactions, both online and F2F. See, I’ll see you at Gnomedex and maybe with some other women there, we can create another punctuation point.

      (By the way, I’m reminded I need to talk with you and others in our Seattle circle about a new idea on the periphery of Gnomedex about the application of podcasting in the non profit/NGO/international development domain. I need to connect with the podcast savvy. I’m still on the periphery of that domain!)

    • 3 Jory Des Jardins // May 2, 2005 at 8:48 pm

      And here I was hoping we would meet! Wait till BlogHer ’06!

    • 4 susan mernit // May 2, 2005 at 9:07 pm

      Please come! You can stay at my house in Palo Alto–I have lots of room. And–I wanted to ask you to co-present my blogging 101 panel–any chance you could reconsider?
      Susan

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