I am sitting in the Newark airport waiting for my connection home and trying to wrap up BlogHer in my mind. I can start off by saying that it exceeded my expectations and was definitly worth hopping over the ocean for. There was an energy there that has surpassed the other blogging conferences I have been to. I am not sure if it was because there was something like 700 women attending on the last day, or just the excitement of making new friends and connections, but there definitely was a buzz in the air.

Day 2 of BlogHer brought with it some really great sessions. I went to a round table discussion on community building where I brought up the point of RSS possibly being a ‘community killer’ or at least a ‘community deformer’. I still believe that the due to flocking behavior being difficult with present RSS practices, conversation will suffer. And the answer may be as simple as building a better reader. (If anyone would like to work on a reader, I would love to brainstorm!). I think that we need a reader that not only searches for the feed, but also for the comment feed (the newer upgrades of the Big 4 tend to include a separate feed for comments). It would not have to download the comments, themselves, but could just show that there are comments to be read. This would still activate the ‘flock behavior’. For me, however, I would need something that sits on my desktop (for reading during travel), has a web app that will sync with my desktop, can scrape for watchwords and categorize the feeds. Maybe something like that already exists, but I have not found it. The best reader I have found so far is FeedDemon.

There was also an interesting session on blogging naked. No, that does not mean without clothes – but without inhibitions. There seemed to be a split between people who got way too personal (sound familiar), and those who did not get personal at all. One woman, however, (Mecca Ibrahim??) summed the problem up wonderfully, ‘I think naked is ugly. I prefer a bit of sexy lingerie. Don’t let all the personal stuff hang out’ (paraphrased). What a great analogy! She was exactly right! Insert a little personality in your text/blog, but don’t expose yourself fully. No one wants to see all your bits swinging in the wind!

My favorite session, however, was …. (this post is too long…read about it in the next (or next) one!)

[tags] blogher, blogher 06, rss, inhibitions [/tags]