(Editor's note: Amy is attending the BlogHer event in Santa Clara, California. She filed this report earlier today.)So here I am at the inaugural
BlogHer conference, sipping tea and waiting for the first session to begin. So far, it's great.
One of the activities at BlogHer today is
Birds of a Feather: informal gatherings of various interest groups that will occur during the day. Participants can create a sign-up sheet for their own topical group, and I created one on citizen journalism. Now (about 20 minutes later) nearly 20 people have signed up! That's pretty cool.
At 2:30 pm today, I'm looking forward to the panel session "Suffragette Journalists: Op-Ed Pages of Our Own." This citizen journalism panel will feature
Anastasia Goodwin, Eveyln Rodriguez, Chris Nolan, and
Lisa Stone. Since BlogHer is taking the "
unconference" approach to discussion, and since it will be a room full of women, I'm definitely going to have to record that session so I can follow it all and blog it extensively later.
Meanwhile: In the plenary session, a
Technorati representative is facing some tough questions about that service's true reliability and relevance. The
Technorati top 100 blogs is getting increasing attention from the mainstream media -- but does it truly reflect the nature and value of the blogosphere?
Most of the audience here seems pretty skeptical about that. And UK blogger
Koan Bremner has been
publicly criticizing Technorati for apparently major (and potentially widespread) lapses of reliability related to
Technorati tags. I'll post here later when the audio of that session is available.
Stay tuned!
