Saga II

Friday, July 18, 2008

Thank you Erika for the wake-up nudge, computers are a wonderous thing. This being a Blogging convention and all the Westin hotel has graciously granted us all free wifi in our rooms and in all of the meeting spaces. It was greatly appreciated by all.

I awoke with the thought of I am going to go out there and network my ass off. Pass out my cards and just blow their minds away. Anyone who has already read my post on the BlogHer website knows this is not what happened, but let me give you a slight recap here. As I mentioned earlier, I am such a material girl. I get my badge and my schwag bag and head off to the ballroom for the opening of the conference. To what to my wondering eyes should appear? Another whole room with more schwag for me dear!

The exhibitor hall is there and I pick one of everything and make fast friends with the people at the HP booth (remember them, they are our friends). I head over to the Norton Symantec booth and get a complete overhaul of my security system on my laptop and a cleaning of all the crap that came with and I never knew what to do with. Fab! Very light breakfast fare of a croissant and a soda and it was time to into the ballroom. HOLY SHIT! This is huge, there are over a thousand people here. Who do I sit with? I don’t know anyone! OMG! And this is where I completely started my total and absurd freak out. I saw a familiar face of someone I had not yet met IRL (In Real Life) but who had promised to hug me so I sat with her (thank you Maria). This being the opening they decided to do a speed dating sort of intro and soon everyone was moving around. I never got the nerve to move around but I did talk to anyone that talked to me.

There were many break-out sessions to choose from and for the first round I chose Who We Are: Introversion, Blogging and BlogHer. It was crowded. Who knew this many people were as shy as me. The panelists were professed introverts and were going to tell us what tricks they used to help them. It was very informative and very helpful. I think one of the best tricks I learned was to use “Is this seat taken?” (More on that later this evening.)

Lunchtime! Yeah you know that excited me, NOT! A boxed lunch that I picked the beef off of the salad and then off to win a Twitter contest from HP, a beautiful pink wireless mouse. I have been wanting to buy a wireless mouse but have not wanted to pay the $40 for it.

Second session consisted of this: What We Do: DIY Content Syndication and Promotion. It too was crowded and HOT! But the info was good. We/I learned how to improve content and how to aim content at some search engines (google). How to use Digg, Kirtsy and Stumble to my advantage. We talked about building traffic through Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Which is best for whom and how to optimize your content towards your targeted audience. If it wasn’t so damn hot in the room I would have thoroughly enjoyed this session. Break time and time to go win a new web cam from those wonderful HP people! Thanks again HP, since I have a web cam integrated in my laptop (ty Kathy) so look for a giveaway soon.

Session number three was one I was very excited about because it was being live casted with another tech conference that was happening this weekend called Net Roots. They were going to have a feed to us and vice versa so we could all intereact. The subject of this session was What We Believe: Two Concurrent Sessions: Progressives: Engaging Those Outside the Political Blogosphere in PoliticalDiscourse...and Action. It says “concurrent” because there was another room hosting a Conservative session of the same genre. Unfortunately the audio issues were quite ominous and it didn’t start out so well. There also was plenty of interaction between the two panels but nearly nothing involving the audience. I decided not to wait it out and headed upstairs for a much needed debriefing (read nap).