Let the Men Pee
Yes, there are men here at BlogHer, and one of the first announcements of the day was that there were only two bathrooms in this building—one for men, and one for women—and that while it may occasionally be OK to guard the men's room door so a gaggle of women can avoid the line at the women's room, we can't completely commandeer the place. LET THE MEN PEE was the plea.
Now that the first session has started and everyone's blogging and uploading photos, network connectivity has ground to an absolute halt, so I'm making notes in TextEdit and uploading whenever the network comes alive. I'm posting photos to Flickr occasionally on the same basis.
I've already run into a couple famous bloggers—Tracey from sweetney, in whose backyard we were rocking and romping last weekend; and Alice from finslippy, whom I met in the bathroom—but for the most part it's the somewhat-less-famous bloggers I'm enjoying chatting with most. I was talking with Amy Muller this morning about work and kids this morning when I realized I'd read one of her posts once (randomly, by following a link on another blog). I was like, wait, are you the woman who had an opportunity to get your kid into the dream school a year earlier than anticipated, and were agonizing over whether you should grab it or not? And yes! Yes, she was. So that was neat.
Amy, out of focus (der, yeah, I know how to use a camera)
I also chatted with Ani and Heather (mostly Heather) about deciding you need a change and then moving to a new place to start over. Heather did that a couple years ago when she quit her Bay Area job and moved from Berkeley to Santa Monica, and I've done it a couple times (DC -> NY/CT, CT -> CA, and CA -> PA) myself.
Ani and Heather
At the moment I'm sharing a table with Suzanne, Jeanne, Angela, and Megan, and we're sort of half-listening to the speakers and half-being silly, taking photos of each other and everyone else. (Oh, and Suzanne's busy fixing her RSS feed.) Meanwhile, Marc Canter is being part facilitator, part instigator/heckler by shouting obvious questions from the peanut gallery (q: "what's the difference between a widget, a module, and a plugin?" answer: "they're the same, really. it's just semantics." q: "does that have anything to do with the semantic web?" a: "ah, no." [much laughter from the in-the-knows]).
Whew, I May Have Reached My Daily Socializing Limit
I don't know how I'm going to make it to the cocktail party. I've spoken to about a dozen women so far (I know, I know—I haven't even made a dent, given that there are about 750 women here), and I'm already running out of steam. Mrs. Kennedy is sitting here with me now, listening to the podcasting presentation, but we're both mostly blogging and having a bit of quiet time. I'm finding that I don't want to have to think about things to say anymore.
Time to Rally
I rallied for a little bit during the Q & A part of the podcast session to chat with Mrs. Kennedy about ice hockey and haircuts and our living/working arrangements, but now I'm taking a break in my room. I'm hoping that Al and Austen get back from the King of Pizza in the next 10 minutes, so I'll have time to video chat with them before going to the Design/Style/Customization session at 5:15.
I'm also hoping that this little break will get me psyched for more schmoozing. If only I could nap and video chat at the same time! Actually, I probably could; all I'd have to do is leave the laptop on and let Austen watch me sleep. Of course, then I wouldn't see him.... Well, fart.
By the way, I'm tagging all my BlogHer photos with both blogher and blogher06, so if you search by tag you'll see the latest. The last couple sessions were fairly dimly lit, so I didn't get much worth seeing, but hopefully—if I rally successfully—I'll get some shots from the cocktail party by the pool.
Yeah, So, Day 2
I realized that I haven't blogged at all today, which is probably a good sign—it means that I'm actually out socializing and interacting and watching presentations rather than hiding behind my computer. This is really the first session that I've felt like I could listen partway while blogging at the same time.
I had a pretty nice time at the cocktail party last night, talking with old friends and making new ones. (For those of you who read about my anxiety over whether or not to drink, I ended up having half a glass of wine, followed by a glass of milk.) I also ended up staying up a bit too late, but whatever, I enjoyed all the conversation and I'm not sleeping well right now anyway.
This morning I'd intended to go to the Mommy Blogging session, even though that term is making me increasingly nauseous, but just as it was getting started Al called. I made my way outside to take the call, and when I poked my head back into the room afterwards, it was completely full. I figured I'd go see Maggie's session on Is the Next Martha Stewart a Blogger?, and boy, did that turn out to be cool. Maggie, who was moderating, made some fabulous points, as did the panelists. Maggie's got an idea that women need to talk more about money—how much they make, how much they charge for their services, how much they pay for help, etc.—and I really think she's right. So many women give their talents away for free because they either don't know what to charge or don't think their services are worth charging for. If we get together and talk about these things, we gain leverage. Think about it, my fellow women.
After Maggie I had lunch with Jeanne and Suzanne and met Suebob from red stapler, and then Jeanne and I flipped a coin to decide whether to go to From Here to Autonomy or Let's Talk About Sex. It was heads, so we went to From Here to Autonomy. We were sitting in the back, so it took me a minute to realize that one of the speakers was the Arieanna that I'd met at yesterday's keynote. When she explained that she had 17 blogs, including ones for Lindsay Lohan and Hillary Duff—both of whom she apparently hates—I realized why I might have detected a wry little twist of the eyebrow from her yesterday when it was clear that I'd never heard of her before.
We both rather enjoyed the session, especially Heather Armstrong's part, but we ended up leaving about 15 minutes early because the room got so freaking hot. Instead we risked getting serious sunburns by sitting by the pool and sticking our feet in the water.
Is it time for cocktails yet?
BlogHer Roundup
I'd really like to be honest about my BlogHer experience, but I think it's also probably wise to be a bit circumspect. I apologize in advance if I hurt anyone's feelings with my honesty or bore anyone to death with my circumspection.
When I first heard about BlogHer in 2005, I was conflicted. On the one hand, I wanted to support women and blogging. On the other hand, it just seemed like it would be a gathering of the popular bloggers we all know and love, and I worried it would just be a love fest among the elite—without any larger implications for women or blogging. I waffled in my conflictedness long enough that registration filled up, and the decision whether to go was taken out of my hands. I think Austen (who, at 7 months, was still nursing) and Al (who's in the "why would you do that?" camp when it comes to blogging) were secretly relieved.
This year I waffled again, though more because the conference had expanded so much rather than because I feared it would be too limited in scope. I knew I wanted to participate this time, but I was a little afraid of ALL THOSE WOMEN, [a] because I'm a bit of an introvert, and [b] because I'm generally not a fan of girls-only anything. In any case, I finally pulled the trigger and registered, and for the most part, I'm glad I did. If I hadn't gone to BlogHer, I probably wouldn't have met Mrs. Kennedy, with whom I'd started to feel I had something in common over the past year. (One thing I didn't realize we had in common until I met her in person: I'm tall, and she's taller.) We happened to meet when I was feeling a little worn out by all the frenzied socializing on the morning of Day One, and the fact that we were able to share a companionable silence at the Podcasting session—the fact that though we weren't talking to each other it felt like we were there together and not just there at the same time—made me like her more than anything else she could have said or done. (We did end up chatting toward the end of the session, and that was lovely, too.)
If I hadn't gone to BlogHer, I definitely wouldn't have met Jeanne, who made me laugh so often and so heartily (and yet without inducing an asthma attack! how did she do that??) that I think she singlehandedly propelled me through Day Two. In addition to being amazingly fun to be around, Jeanne is a voracious reader and prolific writer of amazingly articulate book and movie reviews, so from now on I'm sure never to be without a good book to read. I only wish she lived closer to me (sadly, she's in Seattle), because I would so hang out with her every day if she were nearby.
If I hadn't gone to BlogHer, I also probably would never have crossed paths with Sheryle. I met Sheryle at the cocktail party on Day Two (in other words, a mere hour or so before the end of the conference), when she joined Jane (who's a firecracker in her own right), Jeanne, and me in conversation. It turned out that Jeanne and Sheryle had sat next to one another at an earlier panel (or perhaps at lunch on Day One?), which is how she happened to pick us out at the cocktail party. (So in addition to being great for all the reasons I listed above, Jeanne is also a MAGNET for interesting people.)
Anyway, after listening to Sheryle for a sentence or two and being unable to decide whether her accent was more Georgia or more North Carolina, I split the difference and asked if she was from South Carolina (I figured maybe she was from the Augusta, GA area, which is on the border). She said no, Georgia, but she'd also lived in Virginia, which is probably why I'd had difficulty identifying the accent. At that point Jeanne, Jane, and I got into a frenzied dissection of the origins of various Southern accents ("it was the Irish in Appalachia!" "no, it was the British who colonized Georgia and New England, which is why the Southern and Boston accents are actually pretty similar!"). Sheryle, thank god, only let us go on for about a minute before finding an opening in which to announce, "I should probably confess that I have a Master's in linguistics and dialectology" BEFORE YOU MAKE JACKASSES OF YOURSELVES, she could have added, but didn't.
It occurred to me to mention, since Sheryle was from Georgia, that I had attended the University of Georgia. "In Athens?" asked Sheryle. "Me too!" I replied that I suspected a few years separated our tenures there, at which point Jane's jaw dropped, and she gave me a look like, "I can't believe you just insulted her that way." I read the look correctly and said, "hey, I'm not saying she's OLD. I'm saying that she's probably more than 4 years older than I am, is all." We went on to discover that we'd both been English majors ("Park Hall!") and tried to come up with any professors that we might have had in common. Finally, because I wasn't sure whether Jane had forgiven me the smart-ass "young" person remark, I said, "so what year did you graduate?"
Sheryle laughed and said, "oh, probably before you were born!" I said no, come on, hit me. "1968," she said. Me: "OK, that was the year I was born. See?" I said to Jane, "I wasn't being mean when I suggested that there were a few years between us... though when I said it, I didn't imagine that there were as many as 22!" We all laughed and talked some more about Sheryle's career (she's currently CEO of a company called Quixit), meeting Vince Dooley and other minor celebrities (like, say, Kofi Annan), keeping our brains fit, and where Sheryle gets her hair cut (Ode, in San Francisco).
If I hadn't gone to BlogHer, I wouldn't have had so much time to hang out with Heather, whom I've known for 10 years but whom I rarely get to see. We both lived in the NYC area when we met—at a web conference in Chicago in Feburary 1996—but I moved to San Francisco 6 months later. We taught a couple clases and sat on a couple panels together at various Internet Worlds, but we didn't see each other regularly until Heather moved out to San Francisco herself a couple years later. Then, of course, I met Al, I moved to the boondocks of Mountain View, and then together Al and I moved to Philadelphia, which meant Heather and I were on opposite coasts again. It was so great to catch up and just relax around someone I already knew and felt comfortable around.
I must confess that I went to Heather's session on becoming a better photographer mainly to support Heather, but without seriously expecting to learn anything new (which is not to say that I don't have far, far to go in my photography efforts; I just thought that she couldn't possibly cover anything in depth in an hour). I was surprised and delighted to find that she was able to touch on many useful points, not least of which was how to use the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop (or Fireworks, which is what I've been using until recently). Who knew that I'd been doing it wrong all these years? Who knew that it was called Unsharp MASK for a reason? I have two words for anyone who, like me, has been unhappy with the results of Sharpen in Photoshop or Fireworks or even with adjusting the Sharpness slider in iPhoto: SELECTIVE SHARPENING. (Apparently this was a revelation for Amy, too, as we looked at each other afterwards and said simultaneously, "OMG, Unsharp MASK? I always sharpened the WHOLE THING!"
OK, now that I've gotten the top 4 reasons I'm glad I went to BlogHer out of the way, a quick summary of other things I liked and didn't like about BlogHer:
The Good
Meeting new people.
The Accessibility portion of the Primp Your Blog session. BEST PRESENTATION EVER.
My new Eggbeater t-shirt (buying it from Shuna was pretty cool, too).
It wasn't all women.
The "All You Need is Love" spontaneous sing-a-long when the sound on the "how has your blog changed your world?" Flash movie failed at the Day Two welcoming session.
Arianna Huffington at the closing keynote. I'd seen her in political debates before, but I wasn't sure she'd have anything relevant to say to a bunch of bloggers. Turned out she did.
The Is the Next Martha Stewart a Blogger? session. This was another session I attended more to support the speakers than because I thought I'd be interested, but it was incredibly interesting and informative. Maybe that should be my strategy next year: Go to the sessions I don't expect to be interested in.
Videochatting with Austen every night (and once during the Art Bloggers session; Mrs. Kennedy gave me a "what the hell are you waving at?" look when I got a little enthusiastic in front of the iSight).
The weather. Oh, how I miss Northern California, with its cool, overcast mornings and its warm, dry afternoons.
The Bad
Meeting new people. OK, this wasn't bad, per se—just so, so overwhelming.
The food: Not enough protein at breakfast or lunch, not enough vegetables at dinner.
Also, can we get some sponsors willing to provide real, full-fat, full-taste snacks next year? May I suggest Luna bars?
The water: Now with extra minerals! Yuck!
I don't think I've ever been so dehydrated.
The wireless acess. Totally sucked, but not exactly for the reason given; it was more about misconfiguring the servers than about expecting 800 businessment to check e-mail occasionally. The 800 businessmen made for a better story, though.
The snubbing. Luckily this only happened to me once, but it was still a scowl-inducer: She-who-will-not-be-named: "Hey, good to see you here!" Me: "Oh, hi!" SWWNBN (to friend): "I know her because of X." Me: "Yeah, X, that was fun. I really appreciate..." (at this point I kinda trailed off, because SWWNBN turned her back to me in a gesture that unmistakeably meant "I'm done with you now, move along.")
The hot, hot session rooms. The mind, it tends to melt down as the temperature goes up.
The Ugly
The Hyatt San Jose. Dudes, can you say 'maintenance'? My room was apparently in better shape than most, was only shabby and ill-designed rather than in downright disrepair, and luckily, it didn't reek of anything unusual, but I'm with Suzanne's husband in that it was below my usual standards.
The Missed Opportunities
I didn't get to meet Julie.
Although I met Alice, I think I kind of turned her off with my assertion that "80 to 90 percent of the people here are probably introverts." Alice, as an extrovert (surprise!, at least to me), obviously disagreed, and we never really got to explore our differing views further.
There were probably a bazillion other women (and men!) whom I would have really loved to meet / with whom I probably had LOTS in common, but I just couldn't put myself out there any farther. (Or is this another case for further?)
I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things, as I've obviously been a lot more positive about the whole experience than I thought I'd be when I started writing this, but before I wrap up the roundup, allow me to point you to this interesting post from 2003 on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality (thanks to Al for IMing it to me, and to Karl Martino for showing it to Al). It directly addresses all the griping about "A-listers" vs. "B-listers" (and "first-generation mommybloggers" vs. "second-generation mommybloggers") that I heard this weekend, and makes me wonder where we'll all be next year, when the size of BlogHer (and the blogging community in general) doubles again.
Edited to add: Following are two pull-quotes from the article to whet your appetite. It's not long, and it's definitely worth reading.
A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.
Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.
...
Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone's goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system. The relatively egalitarian distribution of readers in the early years had nothing to do with the nature of weblogs or webloggers. There just weren't enough blogs to have really unequal distributions. Now there are.
Networking
I still haven't made my way to the sites of all the women I met at BlogHer, partly because my blog-reading time is limited by work and family obligations, and partly because as I read each woman's site, I end up getting sidetracked by her archives and photos and links to other sites. I'm finding myself down fascinating side roads this way.
Today I finally made it to Ariel's site and discovered that [a] she's probably the reason one of my Flickr photos has over 600 views, about 6 times more than the rest of my "popular" photos, and [b] she came up with a great way to share details from all the interesting conversations she had at BlogHer without violating any confidences. Check out BlogHer, The game!.