BlogHer '07 Notebook

Instead of inundating you with all I was inundated with at BlogHer, I'll share a few things I learned from my first BlogHer conference, the third annual that drew about 800 bloggers from across the U.S. and beyond.

• So many women are blogging, and they blog for so many different reasons. For community and shared experience; moms blog about their families and themselves and find other moms doing the same. To deal with post-partum depression. To raise political awareness. To fight for a cause. To air voices not heard in the mainstream media....

• Food bloggers are a fun, nice bunch, tight-knit and supportive of each other as they bring us exceptional food blogs. Elise Bauer, who runs the wildly popular Simply Recipes among other blogs, is a celebrity at a conference like this. Alanna Kellogg, one of the nicest people I've ever met, writes a food column that her mother started when she was a baby in a weekly newspaper outside St. Louis, Mo. And she writes the blogs Kitchen Parade and A Veggie Venture. Shuna Fish Lydon, a very funny chef, writes with a unique voice on Eggbeater. (Please add your favorite food blogs below.)

• The "momopshere," a tag applied to mom bloggers across the blogosphere, is thriving, expanding, and diverse. It was a joy to watch women come together who have met and become friends through their blogs, some reuniting and some meeting for the first time. But it seems that cliques form on the web—or at least they are perceived to form. There were many references to high school and hurt feelings as bloggers talked about losing loyal commenters from their blogs, and not getting responses from bloggers they link to or email.

• More bloggers are figuring out ways to make money by blogging. Some are very young. Chloe Spencer, 16, started neopetsfanatic.com and now makes about $30 a day through ads on the site. Of course, it doesn't hurt that her dad is a search engine optimization expert.

• Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic president candidate John Edwards, writes her own blog entries and is their sole editor before they hit the web. I knew I liked her. (She answered questions at the end of the BlogHer conference; you can read the live-blogged transcript of the interview with BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone here.)

• I've got hundreds more blogs I am inspired to read and check out now that I'm home from BlogHer. So how exactly do we find time to read all of these blogs? If someone's figured that out, let me know.  

I could go on, but I won't. You'll be reading about blogs discovered, resources found, and ideas planted during my weekend in Chicago for a long time to come. For more about BlogHer '07, go here.