I attended the BlogHer conference Saturday, July 30, in Santa Clara, California. What a mind trip! I went in thinking I knew what blogging was about. I seriously thought I was already a part of this Web phenomenon with my adoption journal on Babycenter.com and my near decade career of working in the ‘new media’ department of a newspaper. However, about 30 seconds after I arrived (Tardy mind you, breakfast was over and the debates had already begun.) the buzz words started to fly faster than I could write them down for future Googling. Ten minutes into the gig and I realized a few hard truths:

1. This was the first time I was in a room FULL of women who could speak geek.

2. That compared to these women I didn’t actually speak geek. Not really. I faked geek and, when not in this room, other people sucked it up as gospel truth. Why? Because they surf the web with AOL.

3. I may have carried the backpack but did not sport the laptop. Really, I could have shown up naked and been less obvious a stand-out than coming bare of Web supporting technology. I should have worn a black Hanes Beefy-T with neon pink letters spelling out p –o –s – e – r and stomped about in Payless Shoe Source brand fake-ass Doc Martens.

4. I had no fricking idea what Technorati, pingback, del.icio.us, the top 100 list or being ‘dooced’ meant.

5. There are blogger celebrities. Seriously, I mean it. You say into the microphone ‘Dooce’ and this crowd goes wild with vivacious applause. There were other names that elicited this response too; I just didn’t have time to write them down in my Google sponsored notepad. However, after reading some well written, witty and high-glam blogs – this time next year during the BlogHer 2006 conference I’ll be gah-gah for autographs.

6. Mostly I realized I was worse than a poser, I was a newb.

Being a newbie again was humbling. I didn’t want to be a bonehead for much longer and so attended Blogging 101. Also I participated in ‘How to Get Naked,’ ‘Suffragette Journalists – Op-ed Pages of Our Own,’ and ‘MommyBlogging.’

Now you might be wondering why it took me so long to post about this BlogHer conference while everyone else has already super-soaked the Web with their witty, educational and more interesting blog postings on this very subject… Well, for one, I had to figure out which blogging platform to use (okay not really, I just sorta surfed around for a free one that had nifty pre-installed designs), I wanted to dazzle everyone with my new and applied knowledge of Technorati, I found that top 100 list (Not really sure why it’s so exciting though. I’d rather see it broken out into categories of top blogs that interest me – like say adoption, parenting, women’s issues, politics, etc), I got sucked into reading other BlogHer attendees blogs and the most time consuming… well, it was to think of a ‘theme’ and a ‘name’ for my own brand-spanking-new Mommyblog.

Why I chose to start yet another Mommyblog? I’ll write about in a future post.

If you haven’t read any of the BlogHer attendees KICKASS blogs yet, well I’m working on how to add the blogroll to my nav. Yea, sad and pathetic ain’t it. In the mean time you can visit BlogHer and check their high-tech left rail for the blog listings.

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