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Blogging, BlogHer, and Dooce
Is blogging a writing / posting activity that one does with a specific web based content software that allows one to publish to a website chronologically or is it a writing / posting activity that is about keeping a web log of one's life / thoughts irregardless of software running the web site?
If the second, then I have been keeping a weblog (self-publishing) in one form or another since 1996, when I put up my first internet homepage on my exciting 6 megs of space on the Boston University web servers (ACS3, if you must know). From 1997-1998, I had a home page over on the earthlink.net servers. From 1999 - 2003, I hand coded pages of writing and photos at the Barflies.net. And from 2003 to present, I have used Movable Type software at Blackphoebe.com and barflies.net to publish my thoughts and photos.
All this being said, if blogging is a software than my biggest influences were Ben & Mena Trott at SXSWi 2003. If blogging is a community, then Jish is my biggest influence, as he was the first person to be nice to me and invite me into the group at SXSWi 2003 (previous to that, I was an outsider from the Music world).
Previous to attending the first BlogHer in 2005, I had no idea who Dooce was, other than folks I know liked her blog. My first inkling into the web celebrity that is Heather Armstrong is when I was getting out of the car at the parking lot of the Westin Hotel pre-BlogHer 2005, and one of my friends got out of our car and shrieked, "DOOOOOOOOCE!" as loud as humanly possible.
The tall, blonde female person getting out of the car next to us looked horrified. I was mortified and busied myself with unloading the car. While I had not read Dooce's blog up to this point, but I understood in that instant the full power of internet celebrity. One would think it was 1964 and the Beatles had just landed.
During that first one day BlogHer conference in the summer of 2005, I was both excited by being at an event that was for and by women bloggers and more than a bit alienated by the whole thing. All my web related conference attendance up to this point was SXSW Interactive, which does have many bloggers but the focus is quite different. What I did like about the first BlogHer was how homegrown it was and friendly.
The same group of us, plus a few more, traveled up to San Jose late July 2006 for the second BlogHer. This one I spoke at and once again met folks that I would not have otherwise crossed paths with. Yet again, there were aspects to BlogHer that were just plain weird, mostly some of the interpersonal communication and overt familiarity, as well as judgments that folks made about others just based on their blogs genre (mommy bloggers vs. the business bloggers) or by the content on the blog. Odd but true.
The last two BlogHers (2007 & 2008), I did not attend due to other commitments. I did seriously consider going this year, as this would be the only place to meet up with a whole set of great bloggers who don't attend SXSW or other tech events. But in the end, the price of staying in San Francisco, project deadlines in July, and the general weirdness at the other 2 BlogHers I attended kept me away.
Why bring this all up now?
Waiting in my Sage feed reader today, was a post over at Blurbomat by Jon Armstrong on this year's BlogHer and the weirdness that ensued for him and his wife, Heather:
One of the hardest things for me to pinpoint is why this conference [BlogHer] was so different from others we've attended. It's not just that it is a women's conference, or that women are the main attendees. It goes deeper than that. I believe that it touches on how women process things. How women interact. How women socialize (and likely, are socialized). There is an internal nature to women that was much closer to the surface than I have ever experienced. Projections, disappointments, boundaries. All of it. Right on the surface. It's strange to feel so much support along with so much of something else that you can't define. Plus, given that 99% of the people around you have publishing outlets... it can get a little strange.
After reading his post, several thoughts ran through my head:
1) Agh! Blogger drama! Agh! I hate blogger drama the same way I hate Coder and Standardista Drama! It is so pointless and small. Agh! (What a waste of time & energy. If you don't like a blog, don't read it. Simple as that.).
2) Agh. BlogHer weirdness. He's right, there was enough weirdness at the first two years of BlogHer that my whole set of LA based friends have not gone back the last two years. Whenever I mention BlogHer and that I like to read the website, I get pointed, pained looks from my friends.
3) Is Jon right that all this weirdness may be related to it being a mostly female conference? Has he attended any Java or Ruby on Rails or "Rich Web" conferences that are 99.999% male? Dang those conferences are just as weird or even stranger in their own ways than BlogHer (So says the woman who is registered and excited for DjangoCon). But maybe for a guy, going to a deep geek code conference would be more socially comfortable than attending a nearly all female blogging social conference that at times mimics a bizarre group therapy session. The guys at these deep geek conferences try to act socially normal, but dang is it like the techy computer version of a very warped High Fidelity.
4) SXSW Interactive is a unique conference. It is not nearly all male or nearly all female. The focus at SXSWi is not one topic (Web Design or Dev/Programming or Blogging or...), but many. As the result of many topics and the focus of the culture of the web, there are a variety of attendees from almost every walk of life. Rarely is there a large enough concentration of one clique for it to get weird socially for longer than a few minutes. Whether or not there are cliques and private parties at SXSW where people either get included or not and thus feel exluded, this is also true of a number of other events, just not BlogHer.
While I am sorry that there are folks out there idolizing the Armstrongs and folks who hate them; I also think that threats by web folk against other web folk, be it Kathy Sierra or the Armstrongs, is just ridiculous. All of us who write / create / share / post to our websites are participating in a larger community of which we are all creating and are responsible for, thus we need to cultivate our own blogs as well as our community and not poison it.
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I love this post, Ms. Jen and support your views about the entire "blogger division" nonsense. In general, I don't pay enough attention to so-called web "celebrities". So what they say and do (and how people react to them) rarely affects me. Popular bloggers/web designers/we personalities aren't more interesting/influential to me than any of my web friends.
I've been reading Dooce since the blog dawning days (before she got "dooced" from her job) and respect her as an insightful, very funny writer. As for her growing celebrity, I don't think it's anything she specifically wants. But hey, if I had the chance to make a living simply by writing about my life, I would! I saw how some react to seeing her at SXSW and thought "oh wow". So I can imagine how this is magnified during BlogHer.
I've always been interested in the BlogHer concept and love that it has gotten so popular so fast. I've stayed away because - not out of a lack of interest - but because I know how male presence can change the dynamic of a female-focused discussion. I have to say, reading accounts from each conference has been enough to satisfy my appetite.
My biggest problem with Jon's epistle was this paragraph:
"The thing that most gets in my craw about reading the reactions from attendees is that people don’t seem to understand that Heather has helped you in some way. If you blog, Heather has helped you. She’s made it easier for you to accept advertising and easier for you to make money self-publishing online. Heather has helped move blogging into the mainstream."
I don't remember Heather being there in 1996 when we dealt with the reader backlash from adding advertisements to the Quotes of the Day. The absolute hubris of that paragraph made me unsubscribe immediately.
Hi J!
Living in the greater LA area, I can tell you that celebrity is fleeting and what lasts is being committed to one's creative endeavor over time. Fame or popularity does not always turn out how one thinks it will. Sometimes the best album or film is not the one that made the artist famous, but one before or one many years later.
I did start to read Dooce after 2005, and now have her blog on my feed reader. I enjoy her writing and photos, and I am glad that she is able to make a living from it. For folks to get worked about any of it is beyond silly, go apply all that energy into one's own writing or photos or coding or... or...
I have several friends & folks in my community who are bona fide "rock stars" and it always trips me out to see them not in the local community where they are just cool & interesting local artist folk, but out in the big world where people are all "OMG!!!". These moments are usually surreal at best and scary at worst.
I have a theory about fame and the levels of it that I should write up in a blog post. But what it amounts to is that one should serve the gift of one's creativity and not get all wrapped up in whether it is individually private, local, regional, national, or international in scope.
I actually like the whole BlogHer thing both as an idea, as a blog, and as a real space that happens once a year. I am interested in what happens at the East Coast mini-conferences that will happen this fall - of which - J, you might consider attending the one near you. Both times I went, there were plenty of men (aka BlogHims) and it is cool.
The only guy given any trouble is Marc Canter, but that is more about his style of deliver then his gender.
;o)
Hi Anon with the Yahoo Open ID,
I do think that Heather Armstrong was at BlogHer 2006, but since it was bigger and there were multiple tracks, who knows if she participated in that conversation. For me 2006 was a big whirlwind and on top of the whirlwind I had bad jet lag, so my memories are more than a bit foggy.
As for that quote, it hit me wrong when I read Jon's post, too, which is why I started this post by defining my involvement in personal online publishing and who my influences have been, it was my subtle way of stating that I don't find Jon's assertion to be true about my creative output on the 'net.
I think that Mr. Armstrong is a wee close to the subject to have the most objective viewpoint on the long range impact that his wife has had or is currently having on the blog writing community. Time will tell on that.
;o)