BlogHer. Saturday. Sessions!
The a.m. keynote featured Tina Brown of the Daily Beast, Donna Byrd of TheRoot.com and Ilene Chaiken, creator of the TV series “The L Word.” As Fourth Breakfast tweeted during the event, it was a sobering reminder that print is a dying medium. (Pause to note how much I used Twitter during the conference, to garner sound bites from sessions I missed and to make plans to meet friends. During this a.m. session, I retweeted Fourth Breakfast—who was sitting right next to me—and saw a twitpic of Tina Brown which had originated from someone else at my table, and then been retweeted by someone I follow. Small Twitterverse!)
For the first session, I surprised myself by wandering into the TravelBloggers as Boundary-Breaking Evangelists session. I’m not a travel blogger (although, dude! I just checked my travel category and it has 42 posts in it), but I do love to travel. Well, under certain circumstances I love to travel. This list of amazing places is one of my favorite posts ever. So I enjoyed hearing about how four very different bloggers approach the idea of writing about travel. Their strongest collective suggestion was that if you’d like to be a travel writer, being an expert in your hometown or region is an ideal way to start.
Also meeting at this same time were the session for/about the men of BlogHer and the session on women of color and marketing, which featured four seriously amazing women; I heard many many positive reports on that one and I’m sorry I missed it.
After lunch, I attended the session driven by the wonderful writers of Mamapop: Women Writing in the Age of Britney. Like the Mamapop site, this was a session that deftly juggled the funny and the philosophical (and the fascinating). Unfortunately, attending this session meant I didn’t go to the session featuring the BlogHer International Activist Scholarship winners. I heard from several in the audience that this was a real highlight.
On a totally different plane, the session I attended also conflicted with Sponsored Vs. Unsponsored: Blogging for $$$. As a professional writer, I am interested in things like pay scales for professional bloggers (insanely low, IMO) but this session was much more about reviews, giveaways, and the FTC. (And my position on that is that as long as I am honest and transparent in my reviews, I am pretty safe from any G-men who want to come after me.)
On to session three! Another set of tough choices. As you would’ve guessed from the roster of speakers, the crowd in the Dying Is Easy, ROTFLMAO Comedy Is Hard session overflowed the inexplicably tiny room. I got there waaaay too late to even try to listen in. Instead, I wandered into Enough About You … Who’s Reading You? which in the end, turned out to be much like the mommyblogging “tribes” session from the previous day. It dealt with similar issues of balancing what you write about and who you are with what your readers want … or what you think your readers want. In retrospect–no knock against that session–I should’ve checked out Blogging as Storytelling with Neil Kramer and Amy Turn Sharp.
And then there was the closing keynote and the closing cocktail party which featured lots of really meaty appetizers (and copies of Time magazine?) so Ladies M and O and I went to a gourmet grocery store and I had veggie sushi with brown rice like I used to always get for lunch in NYC.
The end.
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And a lovely dinner that was too!
I love the fact that there were so many good topics that it was hard to choose. Much better than the opposite.
You definitely sound like someone I would get along with. Nice, no-nonsense and no drama recap.
Hope we can meet in the middle someday.
The end. That made me laugh. I think I still have two BlogHer posts in me…
Definitely too much to choose from, and yet I didn’t end up attending every session because I’d get caught socializing instead of attending – but it all worked out in the end.
As always, terrific to see you. Can’t believe it is over for another year (although I still haven’t really blogged about it much) — looking forward to NYC!
Sushi with brown rice makes me extremely happy.
I wish I had gone with you for that veggie sushi. My “burger” was over-priced and not that terrific…However, The New Girl ended up sitting with us (also vegetarian) and I would not have had a chance to meet her otherwise.
There were so many good sessions that no matter which one I chose, I know the other would have been just as good.
(I have more to say about BlogHer, but knowing me I’ll move on to the next topic!)
I am hideously flattered that you mentioned me twice in this post:) Fox & Obel was super yummy. I ditched the Mamapop session for the Activist session but arrived way too late. I only saw the Q&A, but one of the audience members was sobbing and said she was really, really inspired. Ah well, I’ll try again next year.