A stupendous day and a half at the BlogHer 2006 conference, plus a whole lot of driving time to digest what went down, has produced the following fledgling thoughts:

Like most things in life, the value you get out of an endeavor ain’t necessarily what you’d thought it would be going in.

It’s too early to tell what I’ll ultimately take away from my two days parked around a pool in San Jose, but I doubt it will be a better way to drive visitors to my site (although there were tips aplenty) or best practices for my business blogging clients (although not only were there plenty, but a volunteer offered to write them up and post them for the group). More likely, it’ll be some echo from the amazing conversation about life and its strange, twisty paths I wound up having in the spa, post-conference, with the wife of a Silicon Valley millionaire. She had never even heard of blogging; I wish she’d start one.

It’s the people, stupid.

As opposed to the stupid people, who were in mercifully short supply (see below). Maybe all the smart people weren’t exactly to your taste, but there was no lacking for smarties. Open-minded smarties, most of them. Nice.

If you are a dude at an all-chick conference, try extra hard not to make a moron of yourself, okay?

Overall, the men who braved the Electronic EstroFest erred on the side of shutting the hell up, which was kind of too bad. Of course, then one of you has to open your mouth and ruin things for everyone. During a session that will remain nameless, one of your gender got up and made a(n erroneous) statement about branding so ludicrous, I was actually embarrassed for him. Since we are polite ladies and your idiotic remark was also completely off-topic, we let it go. That was not your cue to jump up twice more with additional remarks. Dolt.

Chicks do better food. They just do.

Note to SXSW: you want more women in attendance? Hell, you want more everyone in attendance? Food! Food! Food! I know the city of Austin wants to make a buck—five, for water—but the people at a conference want food, now and always and really accessible. I did not walk five feet from a session EVER at BlogHer without there being baskets of fruit or plates of cookies or dishes of something. It improved my mood enormously. And I couldn’t have cared less how many sponsor stickers were plastered on something. Food = good.

xxx
c

Photo of my dream bathroom by image415 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: blogging, BlogHer, BlogHer 2006, communicatrix, conferences.

Possibly the only thing I like better than talking to people is talking to people who are whooping it up for a good cause.

Shane Nickerson has put together a kickass lineup of L.A. bloggers reading favorite pieces from their own blogs. They are:

• Paul Davidson
• AJ Gentile
• Carly Milne
• Shane Nickerson
• Annie Sertich
• Jessica Mae Stover
• Colleen Wainwright
• Wil Wheaton

And, in case the gloriously beautiful image above isn’t displaying, details are:

SUBJECT LINE HERE
8 Bloggers Sound Off on Just About Everything
Friday, June 16 // 7:30pm
at ImprovOlympic
6366 Hollywood Blvd (b/w Vine & Cahuenga)
$15 (benefits Leukemia/Lymphoma Society)

I’m not sure yet how reservations are being handled, and I know IO is 21+ because they serve booze. But it should be a fun evening with lotsa laffs—and THAT’S the way to cheer yourself up!

xxx
c

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, bloggers, blogging, Cheering the Hell Up™, communicatrix, Shameless plugs, Subject Line Here.

My site traffic has been up significantly* this month, despite anemic posting.

Most of it I owe to the hit-and-run gossip juiceheads coming from a particular celebrity board (note to all you looky-loos: yes, I really did kiss him—on the lips—and yes, there really were zero fireworks on either side). I can’t really count that because, like the geeks Merlin sent over back in October when I did a rare (but spicy) riff about my unbridled nerdlust, you don’t gain new readers from your random meanderings, and pretty much all I do on communicatrix is randomly meander. What can I say? Sometimes I like to talk about Sartre; sometimes I like to talk about my twat. Hey—who’s paying for bandwidth here?

Anyway, occasionally someone funny and smart and literate will stumble upon my messy playpen and dig it and tell a few people and maybe even grow my actual reader base, and that’s fantastico, dude. To ease the burden of clicking through the 80 billion links you’ll have to by the time communicatrix is a household word, Michael Blowhard is the most likely patient zero for this here website, sending the far more quality-consistent and popular Neil, who sent the equally far more quality-consistent and popular Brandon, who has already sent more readers my way than I can ever hope to repay him for in tequila or sexual favors. (See? Booze! Sex! Tortuous, English-major-gone-mad sentences full of mismatched words, references and phrases! No wonder I am shunned like sushi at the Sizzler: I’m so incongruous, I can only mean trouble down the road!**)

Regardless of my lack of stickiness***, I still thrill to see those quality leads show up in my stats. You would, too, if your schizo blog cast such a wide, useless net. No one of substance reads me, but by gum, I am at the top of the Google rankings when anyone is looking for the 411 on NSA or the human organ that Georgia O’Keeffe based all those flower paintings on. Still, some things completely confound me.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Samantha Burns.

Somehow, I wound up on Miss Burns’ ‘random bloglog’, which, as she states in her highly comprehensive FAQ, “used to be part of a private blogroll for exploring new parts of the blogsphere, but several readers asked for it to be made public, and voila, it’s now public.”

Firstly, I cannot fathom having “several” readers ask me for anything. I’m lucky if one or two of you post about your fantastic poker site. Secondly, I can’t imagine myself in the RSS reader next to:

1. Britpoppa, who closed up his gossip shop in May of this year
2. Marc, whose ‘Messages’ bear the tagline “trying to keep up with God’s worldwide wonders”
3. Tony, who moved his After Grog Blog to a new URL in May of 2003 (what is it about May, I wonder?)
4. Taranne, who moved her whole Rue to a new URL a year ago (I think…it’s in French)

But thirdly—and most importantly—I couldn’t figure out where Samantha Burns came from. She’s been around since July and already she’s a Large Mammal in the TLB food chain, linked out the ass on Technorati and a finalist for Best Canadian Blog in the Weblog Awards. And while she is quite adorable (see photo, above), it’s not like she sits around pissing off liberals or yakking about her twat.

I think I will just have to get down with the fact that, if anything, I’m the tortoise in this blog race****. Perhaps it is due to my horrible coding skills: I don’t know how to make those fancy Javascript links that have my imprimatur in them even as they direct people elsewhere. Also, I have this little focus problem. As in, I can’t focus on this blog enough to come up with a cohesive theme, much less a marketing strategy.

Or maybe it’s really true that I’m just here for the beer—the blogging equivalent of ‘beer’ being ‘freedom to write whatever the hell I feel like’.

That’s bullshit, of course. I want my micro-brand-Oprah empire just like everyone else in this Oklahoma land rush we call the blogosphere. But after 10 years of writing ad copy and 3 more writing fascist sketch comedy, formats give me hives and self-promotion feels too much like a busman’s holiday.

I pay the price, of course: my little ditties may draw raves and earn me trips to Montreal, but my soapbox sketches still clear the theater.

Ah, well. You two are still here with me, right? Right?

Shit.

“Hello…Samantha?…”

xxx
c

*These things are relative, Chuckles. I’m wagering my former writing partner, Rick Crowley, will be able to eat me twice over in TTLB by the end of the year.

**I had really hoped to squeeze in a sneeze bar reference, but that paragraph was getting ridiculous even by my decidedly loopy standards.

***Yes, I’m reading The Tipping Point. As well as Blink, that Suze Orman book, Found, Getting Things Done (again) and the pertinent content from the New Yorker dating back to J-U-L-Y of 2004. Don’t ever let anyone tell you my eyes aren’t bigger than my stomach.

****Although recent reconfigurings in the TLB knocked me down from a brief
high of Flappy Bird to a shameful low of crunchy crustaceonness.

NOTE: This post originally uploaded on December 13th at 9:15am, but had to be back-dated since, as usual these days, TypePad status is SNAFU.

TOPICS: bloggers, blogging, communicatrix, popularity, Samantha Burns, TTLB.

While I’m new at this whole blogging thing, I think it’s safe to say that “Why Blog?” is a perennial question amongst bloggers. And I include the variations on this, such as: “Why am I blogging about this?” Or better yet, “Why am I blogging about this?” Who am I to be writing things down and throwing them out there for everyone—or no one—to see?

It’s a hot question in the blogosphere lately. Hugh MacLeod points to a staggeringly long entry on Frank Paynter’s blog that asks “Why Do We Blog? I think the sheer number and fervor of the entries answers the question more eloquently than any of the excellent essays themselves: we blog, most of us who do, because it plugs us in—to the community, to the questions, to ourselves. (I’m putting aside those who blog exclusively for the bucks; neither the question nor the answer is of much interest in that case.)

Evelyn Rodriguez weighs in on the Why Blog? question this morning with an interesting spin on the issue: what I’d call the “Morning Pages” motivation:

I was thinking that blogging could be an excellent practice for someone in “transition” figuring out and wondering what they would like to do next in their lives. Your writing will lead you into what’s next for you if you just focus on one day’s post at a time. The pattern between your posts will reveal what your voice whispers but is too shy to shout. And your surroundings and other writers and readers that stumble across your path will inform you as well. Writers become keen observers - about the world about them and the world within. Pay attention to what tugs at you and write about that.

For the uninitiated, one of the chief tools of Julia Cameron’s watershed book on personal transformation, The Artist’s Way, is Morning Pages—basically, daily journaling within very specific parameters designed to empty the mind of clutter and provide a peaceful, open space for growth and change.

What’s marvelous about Morning Pages—aside from the inner peace they give to type-A whack-jobs like me who suck at sitting meditation—is the reverse map they provide. In looking back over where you’ve been , you tend not only to see more clearly where you are but also where it is you are headed. Pretty nifty, that.

Of course, there’s also the huge bonus-extra of getting better at writing and thinking and listening. As I mentioned in my recent post about morphing from copywriter to actor, change is mostly born of lots and lots of boring-ass, repetitive work: what I call logging the miles.

Interesting side-note: while I picked up The Artist’s Way on a lark, it wound up getting me to dump advertising completely and become an actress. At 33. In Hollywood. Which, for those of you who aren’t intimately acquainted with the way things work here in hyper-youth-oriented LaLa, is completely fucking insane. But it turned out to be not only the perfectly perfect thing for me to do, spiritually speaking, but also a good financial move. Go figure.

But I’d have done it for free (and did, for the first few years) because of the joy it gave me.

Just like blogging.

Go figure.

xxx
c

P.S. Today’s JPEG is the Japanese kanji “henka,” or the symbol for change. From the ever-wonderful about.com. Beats that triangle we used to use in high school chem.

TAGS: blogs, blogging, change, self-actualiztion

TOPICS: blogging, truth.