So, I attended BlogHer 2012 Friday and Saturday, August 3rd – 4th. For those folks who’ve never heard of it, BlogHer is a blogging conference centered around women bloggers and was created by the online blogging community / site of the same name. A majority of the attendees are mom bloggers, some are activist bloggers. Some are travel bloggers, photo bloggers, fashion bloggers or are blogging for mental health reasons. Some are sexy sex bloggers. And, some are folks who just like to write to get their thoughts out of their heads. I fall into the last category. There really is something for everyone especially considering the mini-workshops they hold as well. Here are a few pros and cons of attending:

PROS

• I reconnected with several lovely and funny women I met back in 2010, the last time BlogHer was in NYC.
• Met new women who were just generally cool but also discovered we could help each other in multiple ways, business-wise.
• Saw Martha Stewart speak during Friday’s lunch keynote. Drank even more of her delicious well-organized Kool-Aid.
• Attended sessions on the following topics: distributing posts easily and seamlessly; streamlining digital tools to do more with less; creating narrative video content for online media; tightened up my prose in a writing workshop; and tweaked my understanding of female Baby Boomers even more.
• Attended the Sparklecorn party which had a live unicorn, a unicorn cake and a bunch of drunk moms dancing to Tainted Love by Soft Cell.
• I took a Friday off to attend the first day.
• Felt the push to start publishing on BlogHer as well as here. It also made me explore the posts around the BlogHer site more. Gasp.
• Relieved some of the pressure of “publishing just to publish”.

CONS

• I missed the iPhoneography session but the live blog of it lives here.
• It felt like more advanced sessions were needed, especially about pricing one’s services. I would have preferred to hear concrete numbers instead of, “price what you’re worth”.
• There were a lot of brands there but I mostly ignored them as they were in the Expo area.
• Some of the panelists hogged the mic or the panel moderators didn’t moderate (the over talking panelists or the audience).
• I would love to see more actual sessions focused on the craft of writing and not necessarily relegated to short 45 minute workshops.
• The Geek Bar and Writing Workshops should have more than 6 spots available per workshop/mini-session. In a conference with almost 5,000 attendees, only about 200 – 300 available spots over two days seems insane.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be pouring over the BlogHer ’12 Virtual Conference section. In there, you’ll find live blogs, video, audio and photos of any sessions you/I may have missed, especially if you couldn’t make it NYC this year.

If you’re looking for a reason to go, I highly recommend it, especially if you are just going to learn or meet up with people you know online. Next year BlogHer 2013 will be in Chicago July 25th – 27th. On to the Day 1 photos; the Sparklecorn 2012 Party shots will be in another photo post later tomorrow…

The creepy Lorax guy.

The woman in the Kikkoman bottle. I asked my (Indian) coworker if I should be slightly hilariously offended they picked a brown woman to be in a brown bottle costume. Laughing ensued.

Jamba Juice guy knows how to get down.

Oh, Martha Stewart, I heart you. (from the lunchtime keynote)

If you want Martha Stewart’s elves to consider to be featured on the site, tweet her with this hashtag below or email them. 

Panel for Strategic Content Development Across Multiple Media: Onstage, Onscreen, and Online

Pfizer did a good job with their booth. They asked conference attendees to write on Post-Its how they felt about becoming older and place it in their appropriate age groups. The openly secret thoughts were rather telling. I felt inspired by the older ladies’ responses, especially the ones who feel great about getting older.