BlogHer 2006

Jory, Lisa, and Elisa recently announced that BlogHer 2006 will be held in the SF Bay Area on July 28th and 29th of 2006. I already requested the appropriate days off at work.

Then they announced there will be a set of BlogHer panels at SXSW. This is actually bad news for me. I really don't want to spend $225 to go to the conference, but I will feel left out if I don't go since it's in my own town.

I have thought about BlogHer almost daily since I attended the first one at the end of July. I thought about it so much that I locked up and couldn't express how much I enjoyed it and why. Now that they've announced BlogHer 2006, I'm trying to organize my thoughts about what I took away from BlogHer 2005.

This post, though, is just a starter for my own reference. One of the major benefits I get from blogging is the ability to look back and remember what I was doing, and yet I posted very little about BlogHer. Yes, Google and Flickr can help me find things that will help me remember. However, they don't (yet) store events from my point of view.

So first, two choice memories:

• Early in one of the big group sessions, some of the audience members weren't speaking directly into the microphone when it was passed to them, so we couldn't hear their comments. Lisa Stone interrupted (politely) one speaker to ask "Would you mind Tina Turnering the mic a little bit?" For the rest of the day, whenever the problem recurred, she would yell (politely) "More Tina!"
• During the panel "Flame, Blame, and Shame" when people were discussing their fears about their kids being harmed due to their blogging, Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog said (somewhat) quietly "I wonder if Kevin Drum worries about his cats being stalked?" (For those of you who don't follow blogs, Kevin Drum pioneered the practice of Friday Cat Blogging.)

Next, some lists. (Surprise!)

I thought about putting these lists after the jump, so those don't care wouldn't have such a long post taking up front page real estate. But quite a few of these folks are blogging for business reasons, and page rank translates into business opportunities. Technorati only counts links from the front pages of blogs in their page ranks. So whatever smidgen of help I can give those people by linking from the front page, I am going to do it.

People I met and conversed with:

• schoolsmelt
• Sour Duck
• ae of Arse Poetica
• Ping
• Kitt of nags of a similar ilk
• Matthew Homann of LexThink, who blogs at the [non]billable hour
• Susannah Gardner of Hop Studios and Buzz Marketing with Blogs
• Jory Des Jardins, one of the conference organizers, who blogs at Pause
• Lisa Stone, another one of the organizers

Other blogs that came across my radar screen because the authors attended BlogHer 05:

• apophenia by danah boyd, who wears great hats
• Elisa Camahort, the third organizer, has a personal blog and also writes Healthy Concerns, among others
• Sepia Mutiny (One of the authors tracked me down after a group session where I made a few comments and personally invited me to read the blog and ask questions if they ever used any terms I didn't understand, which I thought was lovely of her. It's also a highly entertaining blog, so I'm glad she pointed it out.)
• Culture Kitchen, which has excellent business cards
• Marian's Blog
• Writing is Fighting by Laina Dawes

Blogs I found through via mentions at the conference or on the BlogHer blogroll:

• Woman of Size
• Femme La Guerre
• Fussy (I know, I'm the last person on Earth...)
• Conversations with Dina
• Reznet Blog, part of Reznet News: Native American Student Journalism
• afronetizen

Two even less interesting lists after the jump.