Roll out the Barrels...of Bloggers

There are three major blogging conventions going on this weekend. I am at none of them.

Tiffany from If I Were Queen of the World is at the BlogHer convention, the annual meetup for bloggers of the female persuasion, which is being held in San Francisco. She is traveling in the company of Missy from Australia, who blogs at Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch. You can follow along on their adventures on their blogs, or get more frequent updates from Tiffany's Twitter thing.

From BlogHer's mission statement:

Founded in February 2005 as a labor of love by three bloggers, BlogHer's mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women, via annual conferences, a Web network (http://www.blogher.com), and an advertising network of more than 2,200 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates (http://blogherads.com). BlogHer Inc. is owned by three co-founders and has backing from Venrock (http://venrock.com).

(Tiffany's site is using an emergency backup template, since someone hacked her original site at around the time she was leaving for BlogHer and took it down. She's been able to get it up and running again, but a lot of the customizations are gone.)

Austin, Texas is playing host to two diametrically opposed blogger conventions this weekend, as I first learned from this report on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. On the Left, Liberal (or Progressive) bloggers are gathered at Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos.) From their website:

Netroots Nation amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate. Within that campus, we strengthen community, inspire action and serve as an incubator for progressive ideas that challenge the status quo and ultimately affect change in the public sphere.

Across town, Conservative bloggers are meeting at the euphemistically-named Defending the American Dream Summit, sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which appears to be primarily an anti-environmentalism group . From their "About" page:

Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP Foundation) is committed to educating citizens about economic policy and a return of the federal government to its constitutional limits. AFP Foundation’s educational programs and analyses help policymakers, the media, and individual citizens understand why policies that promote the American enterprise system are the best method to ensuring prosperity for all Americans. To that end, AFP Foundation supports:

● Cutting taxes and government spending in order to halt the encroachment of government in the economic lives of citizens and pointing out evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse.
● Removing unnecessary barriers to entrepreneurship and opportunity
● Restoring fairness to our judicial system by stemming the tide toward “over-criminalization” of economic activity spurred by over-active attorneys general.

I wonder how effective these summits are at increasing the connectivity of the blogospere and improving the overall quality of the global conversation? Or do they just degenerate into a bunch of drunken bloggers and their friends singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a variety of keys? Not that there's anything wrong with that...


Title Reference: Mark from Wilkes-Barre Online answered the question "What do you call a group of bloggers?" in the title to this post. Because every blogger, boy or girl, Liberal or Conservative, is just another monkey with a typewriter.