BlogHer: Too Many Sessions, Too Little Time

Scanning the BlogHer conference schedule poses a dilemma: How can I be in two (or three or four!) places at the same time?

How can I choose between "Pursuing Your Passion Never Gets Old," "Beautiful Blogging and Positive Posting," "Building Traffic via Content and Community" or "The Commercial Momosphere - Policies Ethis and Outreach"?

These are four of the five break-outs that are about to begin (the fifth is "Women Without Children and the Blogosphere" -- which also sounds interesting, even if it doesn't apply to my personal situation).

I've opted to skip them all so I can put up this post. And I did not attend the morning keynote ("Hybrid Media - How we will all work together to build  converged media future"). I slept in this morning (until 7:00). Then I hit the hotel restaurant for a proper breakfast (fruit and pastries doesn't cut it for me any longer). I also spent about 20 minutes going through all the swag I collected and designating the material I'll be bringing to BlogHer and Zwaggle's "Recycling Room" (as nice as it is to receive the lovely baby sling and Medela bottle, those are items I KNOW someone else will be able to use!)

Yesterday I remembered how tiring BlogHerCon can be. I was an official live blogger at past events and so felt duty-bound to go to as many sessions as possible -- and shuffled off to bed exhausted each night. This year is so different. I skipped the two afternoon sessions and closing keynote so I could write about the one I did attend... and get to a Silicon Valley Moms event in the afternoon, which was so crowded and overwhelming that it was necessary to chill out afterwards. So instead of going to the official BlogHer party (which featured stars of the TNT shows "The Closer" and "Saving Grace"), I slipped out to a nearby restaurant for a quiet drink with my friends Liz and Michelle...

...we finished our evening at a lovely dinner that was thrown by my friends at Nintendo, which took place on a Hornblower cruise around the Bay. We left the pier with a view of ATT Park, where the Giants were in the process of losing to the Brewers... cruised over near the Golden Gate Bridge and then got really really close to Alcatraz... before returning back to our pier. It was midnight before our open-air sightseeing trolley deposited us back at the hotel, where I ran into my MOMocrat friends Glennia, Joanne and Steph.

No wonder I'm dragging today!

I'm trying to talk myself out of feeling guilty. You don't attend an event like this JUST for the sessions (although the educational component of a conference is the initial draw). The social aspect might be even more important. I know I wrote a lot yesterday about how deep bloggers' online relationships are, but those relationships intensify when you actually MEET one another face to face, which was the subject of an article in the current issue of Wired (which points out that online networking just isn't as effective as using PERSONAL contacts).

I have learned more in two days from just TALKING with people like Liz, Michelle, Shannon, Jenn, Karoli, Jenny, and Elizabeth.

And so I'm discovering that BlogHer, like the life of a mom, is a place where you need to learn to balance. If in the past my time leaned a bit too much on the side of attending the sessions, then it's not surprising that this trip is leaning a bit too much on the side of socializing. There's a sweet spot somewhere in between -- which I'm hoping to hit today.

So I've opted to attend the 11:30 "Room of Your Own" session on "Who Better Serves Women - Obama or McCain?" And I'll be live blogging it. For me. And the social stuff will follow...