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I'm taking the madness abroad: I'm speaking at the Women Business Blogging Conference in the UK

One of the questions I'm often asked regarding BlogHerCon is "Why a conference for women?" And I remind them, the event is for men, too. But we launched BlogHer in 2005 to provide a place for women where they could address their specific uses of social media. Sure, there are tech heads and gurus in our midst whom you'd see at the other blogging conferences, but there are also Mombloggers, personal diarists, knitting bloggers, food bloggers, you name it. And they want an event that connects them to others in their communities and provides discussion on their specific slice of the internet. Our approach to building community and addressing the many reasons why we blog is equally valuable to both men and to women, but it sprang from a need to incorporate the needs of women bloggers.

You might wonder, why do women need a business blogging conference? We showed at BlogHer Business that even in a field like business, where (for the purposes of this argument) men and women hold equal sway, there is something unique about how women approach the subject. By most reports BlogHer Business was as collaborative and practical as business conferences come. Men and women alike shared best practices, whether formally in sessions, or by scrawling a new tool on the back of a napkin. But it was a women's conference because it fully leveraged women's innate ability to share by example and through storytelling. And it offered up knowledgeable speakers who were women.

The success of BlogHer Business emphasizes the need I see for the Women Business Blogging Conference in the UK on June 8. Conference founder Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media, Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University, has pulled together an event in conjunction with her department NLab (Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries) that brings much of what we've established with BlogHer to European academics, non-profits, marketers, and small business owners.

When business travel and family don't mix: A vignette

I was in New Orleans this week on business and met with a collegue who was born and raised there. I felt incredibly lucky touring the French Quarter with this woman, who seemed to have a memory for every corner we approached, and who nearly smacked my hands when I attempted to extract the meat from the wrong end of a crawfish.

Also, quite randomly, I nearly walked into Evelyn Rodriguez on Royal Street. She wasn't there for the conference; she was just traveling and looking for a place to eat. This, by the way, is a coincidence of seismic proportions; I am used to seeing Evelyn at most of the conferences that I attend in the Bay Area, but not halfway across the country by accident.

Sorry, I digress. My Cajun companion, Lisa LaCour of AOL, had come to New Orleans earlier in the week and decided to spend the rest of her time in a hotel, not with her parents.

"It's just better that way," she said.

"Yes," I said to Lisa. "Family can be distracting."

"Mine keeps me out all night," she said. "I need to stay at a hotel so that I can sleep." I wasn't expecting that.

I would opt for a hotel in order to keep Church and State separate. It's been difficult coming to Chicago and being in head-down work mode. My family struggles to understand why I can't sit down for even ten minutes of Trivial Pursuit. For the most part my family totally gets that when I am home for a business trip I am stopping in and likely not spending quality time with them. This last time I was in Chicago my meeting was in the Near North Suburbs, about 15 minutes away from my Mom's house.

"How perfect!" Mom said. "You can take the Buick to your meeting."

This, by the way, was a very generous offer, but it held a lot of baggage for me. Growing up, we never had cool cars. Sometimes we didn't even have working cars. This stems from a deep-seated disdain of my father's for anything new. Whatever the reason, it was terribly embarassing. Imagine having to drive to parties in a Custom Cruiser. Some would say I'm a middle class spoiled brat--at least I had a car to borrow. To that I say, fair enough.

"I can't do that Mom," I said. "I can't drive the Buick to my meeting." The Buick, by the way, is a 90s model Century Ltd. that had seen better days with its original owners. My Dad got a good deal on the car back at his job at a Buick dealership. There was nothing wrong with it, per se, but it called up a past that I vowed never to recreate of having cars that I was afraid to parallel park.

Suddenly my Mom took on a tone that was reminiscent of my high school days, "What? Do you think anyone CARES what you are driving to the meeting?"

"Yes I do. I think the world cares. I think this is an issue of critical, world-changing importance."

"You're full of it."

I looked over at my brother, who had been kind enough to pick me up from the airport.

"Joe, can I borrow your Vibe?"

"I thought you didn't like Pontiacs."

"That was before I was faced with the alternative of driving a Buick."

"What time is your meeting?"

"10 am."

"Ummm no."

"Where's the closest car-rental place?"

"Don't be silly, Jory. Take the Buick!"

The next morning I took a few minutes to acquaint myself with the Century Ltd. I drive a little Jetta normally and needed to acclimate myself to having more car, much the way I would need to acclimate to waking up with my chest two bra sizes bigger. What can I say, it would be disorienting! My Mom and I are nearly the same height--did she drive on her tippy toes? I pulled the seat closer toward the steering wheel. The automatic gear shifter was to the right of the steering wheel--a peeve I've had about all of my parents' cars.

"Hun," Mom said from the street. "The turn signal is a little quirky. If you don't turn it just right you activate the windshield wipers." I signalled right and saw what she meant.

Mom said, "I'm not sure how the car is on the highway. I haven't driven it there."  To my mother any Interstate is like merging onto hell and to be avoided at all costs. Hence the reason my brother picks me up from airports, and why getting places with my family takes twice as long as it does other people--they take only side streets. I worried about this car; for years it had been driven at 35 miles per hour. Would I try to gun it on the expressway and lose the engine?

"Wish me luck," I said.

"Hun," Mom said. "I think you'll survive."

Congratulations on your diversity policy, but why can't poor people work here?

There's a key scene in the film The Pursuit of Happyness, which I caught on the plane ride home from a business trip last week; it speaks volumes about how companies fail to account for the financially diverse backgrounds of their employees, even while having corporate policy in support of diversity.

More of my post on Fast Company Blog...

It's Official: I've Joined the Board of FeedBlitz

The press release says it all. I'm thrilled to be working with Phil Hollows and Tom Evslin. I agreed to do this a few months ago, but it took a little while to put it in digital ink.

I met with them in New York, before BlogHer's Business Conference. Two geeks (and I mean that in only the nicest way) who crackle with ideas. I can already tell my role will be collecting that energy and helping to showcase it.

Truly, I feel Feedblitz is onto something and can help bridge the gap between established publishers who are seeking to integrate social media practices and technologies (RSS, blogging) and bloggers who already are using these technologies and raising the bar of their enterprises to top-tier media company caliber.  There are some cool new features that FeedBlitz has incorporated (newsletter generation via Twitter, anyone?) and some more that are on the near-horizon.

I'm excited to be working with the FeedBlitz team!

FeedBlitz

Phil Hollows

Tom Evslin

RSS newsletter

Twitter

What's 'The Secret?' Sure, you know it already, but watch the DVD anyway

H-band tells me he got his Subaru WRX, six years ago, through manifesting.

He explained: "I had been wanting that car, and I said, 'I will have that car.' I just wish I had been more specific about the circumstances."

Shortly thereafter he was hit by a truck while cycling. He bought a WRX with the settlement money.

This stands as H-band's proof of concept--that thinking about things, and declaring that you will have them are the first steps to getting them.

I must confess I've always been a manifester myself, though I never quite made the connection that I had created these outcomes. As a teenager I would ogle a boy and poof, I'd get a call out of the blue from him. I always assumed I would live in New York, so when the opportunity came through a friend to come live with her and work as a college intern at a New York City publishing house, I took it in stride. BlogHer has been a result of manifesting possibilities of teaming up with smart people and building a platform that bucked the standard of one-size-fits-most media. I have handwritten pages of material showing that at some point I had already imagined these things.

I've visualized throughout my life, though I never did it to get anything; I just have a VERY vivid imagination, and imagining these outcomes felt good. What scares me is when I stop visualizing, when my life becomes too complicated that the natural manifesting mechanism shuts off. When I become stressed to a point where negative energy fills my brain, and I can't focus on the positive.

My friend and coach Elisabeth suggested that I watch The Secret as a way of getting me back in touch with my positive imagery, to get me clear again on the importance of positive thinking to realizing outcomes.

I asked H-band to watch it with me, knowing that he has always been a proponent of manifesting, but that he also qualifies his desires by what makes sense, how much we currently have in our bank account, the number of hours in a day. Basically he and I have become entirely too reasonable.

Time management: A more intuitive guide to productivity

The original title of this post on BlogHer was: "Put Down the Time Management Book and Back Away..." I guess I got a bit long-winded. My take on multitasking sanely.

The New, New Manager: What Geeks Can Teach Us About Getting Stuff Done

Geeks are useful people--here's one more reason why.

Entrepreneurial Sin #7: Forgetting what's an obligation and what's a choice

My first job out of college was at a publishing house. I was 21 years old and making $19,000 a year. This company offered me $1,000 more than the others, so I figured it was a good deal. I did the math and saw that I could just eek by on that much, even in New York City. But then my father reminded me to factor in taxes, and I realized that I was screwed.

I ended up taking editorial work on the weekends to make ends meet, which didn't leave me much time for personal pursuits. Technically my job was to provide support for the editor in chief of the imprint, though I was also expected to read manuscripts and write reports recommending that the title be sent back to the agent with a rejection letter, or that they get a second read.

I was too busy during the day to read manuscripts, so I read at night, while I ate, while my boyfriend watched TV next to me, in the laundry room, in cafes. I got together for social outings with other editors, and we sat together to read. This was our "down time." Email was available, but you couldn't fit entire manuscripts on disks as efficiently as you can now, so we had to carry these double-spaced, single-sided, 450-page manuscripts to and from work. I was always weighed down with paper, much like today I'm always weighed down with my laptop.

One of the most common comments I heard under the breath of my peers was, "They don't pay me enough to (insert boring, time-intensive task here)." I felt that way about copying manuscripts, but never about reading during every waking leisure hour of my life. It never occurred to me that my biweekly check for $550 was hardly compensation for the work that I did from 9 to 5. 

But this was the ethic of publishing, the "dues paying" that was required to get to a point of financial self-sustainability. Note I didn't say wealth; we goaled no further than to get to a point where we didn't have to go to bars with free hush puppies for sustenance, or live in apartments with fewer bedrooms than inhabitants (one of my friends managed the rent of her well-appointed one bedroom on the Upper East Side by having three roommates). I just wanted to have dinner out once in a while and not fret about spending $20.

Though I was cash poor, I didn't feel the financial sting as much as I felt the pressure of expectations--of having to show up for work every day; of having to be accountable to a boss. I coped with this pressure with an occasional mental health day, roughly one per quarter, and it was always on a Wednesday, the "Hump Day" as I liked to call it. I figured, I managed to make it half-way through the week, and now I deserve a day before attacking the latter half. But even on these days I read manuscripts; I was never fully free from my job.

My boss was totally onto me: "It's strange that you always tend to get sick on Wednesdays," she once said. No one questioned her when she took "Reading Days" to do nothing but read incoming manuscripts. It made sense to me--she should take days to immerse herself in the titles she bought, but didn't have the opportunity to when in the office. I longed for seniority to make more money, yes, but more importantly, to get to take Reading Days.

Years later I still yearn for Reading Days.