Greetings from Santa Clara, CA
It's been a hectic day, but I landed at San Jose Airport around 1:30 this afternoon and made it to the Santa Clara Westin with just enough time to grab some lunch and head next door to the TechMart for an orientation meeting set up for the speakers and live bloggers.
(Sorry, Jen, but no Dooce at this meeting - but I did meet the marvelous Grace, Mary, Susan and Chris - as well as Mommy Blogger panelists Jenny, Meghan and Jenn.)
I spent much of the meeting trying to connect to the TechMart's wi-fi network. My computer has a quirky hardware thing where if it cannot find a wi-fi network, it goes to blue screen. I tried to connect about five times before the meeting started and I began taking notes in Word. (I eventually learned that the conference organizers also had trouble connecting earlier this afternoon - and after the first half of the meeting, I eventually got online. <whew!> Note to self: Register at 7:30 a.m. and give self 90 minutes to try to connect. Um. Give self 30 minutes to try to connect, then find someone who will lend me a computer so I will be able to meet my live blogging commitment.)
Anyway - here are my notes from the meeting. It's time to go to dinner, so I have not yet cleaned them up - check back later for the full report!!
Organizers Lisa Stone, Elisa Camhort and Jory Des Jardin are friendly, lovely people who are obviously running on adrenaline about now.
Lisa began by asking all of us to introduce ourselves. The room burst into laughter when Ronni Bennett announced she was doing “Getting Naked.” (Actually, this session is titled "How to Get Naked" and refers to those of us brave enough to blog about what is extremely personal.)
Elisa announced - to much applause - that for this event, they are converting one of the men’s rooms into a women’s room.
Lisa and Elisa spent some time talking about the BlogHer mission and feedback from participants’ survey (nearly 100% responded). They offered some interesting statistics:
Lisa said one of the key things she's learned from other confabs is, “When you get this many women in a room, brilliance happens.”
In offering guidelines to the moderators and panels, she said there were three things to ask the audience to keep in mind:
- What have you learned (from panel/conversation/experience)
- What will you do with this information?
- What would you recommend to someone who wasn’t lucky enough to be here?
An important point for this conference is that they are deliberately avoiding anything that's stiff/professional/formal. There will be no podii on the platforms, and Powerpoint presentations have been banned from all the sessions except the educational ones.
While BlogHer is grateful to have some powerful vendors participating in the event (Technorati, Six Apart, Yahoo, Google, Weblogo, Common Net, Pheedo -- an one of the Room of Your Own sessions is from MSN Spaces), the moderators are to steer the conversation away from gratuitous self promotion.
Lisa pointed out that at this conference we are going to have press – but we’re all press if we’re bloggers. "If you open your mouth, expect to be quoted."
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