Cheryl Contee of Jack and Jill Politics took the picture of me.

BlogHer has evolved tremendously since I attended the first conference back in August of 2005 in San Jose. There were only 300 attendees then, but it was a remarkable feat because blogging was still “new”. Blogging was not considered mainstream, and also not considered “women’s work”. Blogging then was equal parts confessional, conversational and confrontational. Most of the influential bloggers were men back then but Lisa, Elisa and Jory knew differently. They created a community where women can blog and now there is more content that is more informational and inspirational as well as being confessional, conversational and confrontational. The totality of voices is what Blogher has facilitated and that is great.

I didn’t attend any of BlogHer parties this year, mainly to stave off even more information overload. Part of me still feels like I am still recovering from SXSW back in March. Attending conferences is actually hard work mentally with so much information absorbed in a short amount of time. It is hard to remember anyone’s names or what they blog about, what twitter handle to start following or what URL to bookmark.

Instead, I enjoyed learning about how to run for office and how to increase traffic to my blogs. I ran into friends I met at SXSW, Foodbuzz, Blogging While Brown, Techmunch as well as fellow New York City bloggers. It was great to see them all.

• http://www.rljart.com/blog/?p=3145 BlogHer – helpful notes and more thoughts // rachel & the city

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