Update: I can no longer attend BlogHer and am looking to transfer my full conference pass to someone else (for a discount). Please contact me if you are interested.

Last year I wanted to attend BlogHer in Chicago, however since we were still pretty much a single income household at that time (and my passport had expired) it just wasn’t in the cards so I settled for simply being listed on their site. Good new though, this year the conference is taking place a little closer to home on the West Coast.

What: “BlogHer’s annual conference is like no other — it is the thrilling diversity of the blogosphere come to life! Featuring technical labs, educational workshops, intense discussion sessions, relevant sponsors, speakers from every corner of the blogosphere, established and new, and plenty of opportunities to network and socialize.” [BlogHer Conference]
When: July 18-20, 2008 (starting with a first-timers conference on day one, the full conference on day two, and a more loosely scheduled unconference on day three)
Where: San Francisco, California

Highlights this year include a session with Heather Armstrong of Dooce, “Living the Truman Show”, who also has a book that is being released this spring. This is the 4th annual BlogHer and they now also have a business specific event, happening in New York over the next week.

I’ve been designated as a volunteer (with a bloghership), so on top of my live blogs I’ll also be capturing audio at the sessions, perhaps some interviews and some great soundseeing. I’m looking forward to networking, chatting, and blogging alongside so many great female bloggers from across the continent.

Register now for the conference to get in on the early bird pricing (which ends tonight!). You can also pick which days and events you’d like to attend, which are broken up in the fee schedule. Also, if any Vancouver companies would like to sponsor my trip I’d be happy to include lots of link love in my blog posts, contact me for more details.

Continuing the Vancouver Blogger Profile series of bloggers who don’t necessarily have to be from Vancouver, I contacted Barbara Doduk (Flickr) (Website) who has been publishing content online for the last decade and is responsible for numerous projects around the web.

Barbara Doduk on Flickr

Barbara first came on my radar a few years ago and more specifically during Blogathon 2006, who along with my friend Alanah, inpired me to take on Blogathon in 2007. Here’s more info about Barbara:

Who are you? The question of all questions. Unfortunately the answer is a life-long ever-evolving answer. At the most basic level, the answer is I am human. This means I was born, do live and will die, and during my life I will experience all that life has to teach me. On the complicated end of things, the answer is I am B, and everything that comes along with being uniquely me.

Where do you blog (which sites)? I started a web site in 1997 originally called Gator Jaw (I like alligators, and like to talk) but not long after I came up with the title wiredSecret, and own the URL for it. I used the site to house my creative writing, poetry, photography and my journal, but now it is primarily my poetry blog.

Over the years I evolved with the currents of the web, and came up with the idea of The Love Blog as my personal blog in 2005, moving all my journal content there. However in 2006 I did a massive Spring cleaning of The Love Blog as I began a new life.

In 2006 I finally launched a project I brainstormed in 2001, called The Unity Project. Which in conjunction with a Flickr group showcases photos of Unity from around the world.

More recently I was asked to join the United World Bloggers, and I have been a blogging member of a lovely local web site called Wet Coast Women, and we are planning a little gathering in the next month. Finally just this month I have joined the Vancouver Metblogs.

Lips of Unity – by Barbara Doduk on Flickr

Why do you blog? Since I could put a pen to paper, I have been writing. I have diaries and journals going back to my teens collecting dust in my closet. I have been writing short stories and poetry since I was in elementary school. I had a computer in the 80s and used it to print out binders full of my words. In 1996 I took I a creative writing class with a local writer and was a part of a group of writers (from the class) that would met every month. I was banging my head against the wall attempting to get my stories published in local lit magazines like Event, Prism and Grain. Since I had been online since 1995, being a total geek, I dug into the idea of how to host a free site to showcase my creative work that way. I snatched up a free geocities web site in 1997, taught myself web coding, and so began my journey into the wild web (read more of my web history).

What’s your favourite thing to write about? Life. Humanity provides everything one needs to be inspired to write. My life has been a fairly open book in that regard. I have taken many a criticism from various people over the years for being too open and personal, but that is just who I am and I will not stop being that way. I know my family and friends have often cringed about topics I have revealed that they themselves may have felt shouldn’t be talked about publicly.

Yet I stand by my statement, I am human. We all are human, and we should always be allowed to fail and to be able to revel in that failure and then rejoice over the lessons we obtained from our faults and failures and our spectacular mistakes, just the same as we would and should revel in our successes, and boast about our accomplishments.

What is the BEST part of blogging… or if you prefer, the worst? The best part of blogging is the connections it allows me to make with other people all over the world. I have some fantastic friends from all my years being online, many of them I have met in person and I love them dearly. I love it when someone I don’t even know is “touched” by something I have shared about my life, and can relate and reaches out to me to express how much I unknowingly helped them in a time when they needed a little restoration. There is a great sense of satisfaction from knowing I have spread love.

The worst part would have to be that people think they know me because of what I write and share, and they psychologically analyze me thinking that they have any idea of who I am in reality. The pieces of me you see online, are exactly just that, pieces, just parts of a much larger puzzle that most people will never see.

Do you write for yourself, your readers, for Google, for a living? As I explained in the previous question, I have always been writing, so first and foremost I write for myself. Secondly, of course, I write for my readers. I think about what I feel like typing about, I write it, and then I think would people find what I just wrote interesting too. Sometimes I don’t even think about the readers, and just hit publish. Sometimes I don’t hit the publish button, sometimes something will sit for a while and I will come back to it a few times to polish my thoughts. It all really depends on the subject.

I don’t write for a living, but one day I know I will publish a book (or more than one). It is a goal of mine, but I don’t want to force it to happen, when the story is ripened to perfection within me, it will come out and it will be. Until that time, I am content to keep doing this, and see where it leads me.

Would you ever censor yourself/Do you feel the need to censor yourself? I do censored myself. I think in life we all do, as a form of self protection, or to protect those we love. I have lived through a great many things that have never been written about in the journals over the last 11 years. It may have been eluded to, or written about in a removed way, through poems or stories, but there is so much that I actually do keep private. I know a lot of people might find that hard to believe because I am so open about so much of my life, but I have kept a lot off the web.

PC, Mac or Speak n’ Spell? As I said I’ve had a computer since the 80s. I switched to Mac in 2000, and haven’t looked back, but I do use Windows too. To me, Apple is just more high end, and so far virus-free, where as with Windows I was always fighting problems using it online. If you keep Windows offline, the system is good. I still use pen and paper too.

Mimzie’s blog theme by Barbara Doduk

Blogs you read or would recommend: There are so many great blogs out there, and surely I haven’t even seen them all, but some of the ones I like best are: 1MillionLoveMessages – Mauro has taken on a massive project to collect 1 Million Messages of Love… I had the privilege of being 1st, and have added many more and continue to, but I think everyone out there could send one in.

My friend Mimzie in NY always has something on her blog that makes me laugh. She has a fab sense of humour which shines through in her “Ask Mimzie” posts.

Mimi Lenox has a great project called Peace Globes that everyone can get behind. This woman is unstoppable. Olga the Traveling Bra – is priceless. Pearlz of Creativity – This lovely lady June has a great blog, but she also does a project which I would like people to support called Gumboots4Peace. Finally, of course I recommend you read all of mine!

One conference for women in business, another that bridged all realms of traditional and digital media, and a concert at the Commodore. You could say it’s been a pretty full weekend so far over here but it didn’t end with that.

I headed up Mount Seymour this afternoon and despite forgetting to wear my goggles and getting whipped in the face with all their fresh powder, it was an really great time. Lines were short, the snow was crisp, and I was pretty much given the rockstar treatment – I even ended up getting a great tshirt all because of this here blog.

Three hours in I was also treated to a snowmobile ride up to Mystery Peak and I gotta say, it was fast, bumpy, slightly scary, and amazingly fun. I’ve been going to Seymour for over 10 years because it’s inexpensive, not too overcrowded, and the views are breathtaking. Not only can you see downtown and over to Vancouver Island, but you also get an eastward view clear across the Fraser Valley.

Mount Seymour fast facts:

Having this scenery close off my weekend is something I could really get used to (along with the Canucks beating Calgary 6-2). The snowboarding season in Metro Vancouver is far from over so check out Seymour’s spring skiing schedule.

Meet Your Monsters: Solving Traditional Broadcast Webmares

“The digital world is not all that scary – despite the monsters under your mainframe! This panel will focus on successful case studies in how the medium is being used effectively. The players will present new models for the future.” [Bridging Media – Session]

Panelists:

Boris Mann: Raincity Studios and Bootup Labs
Robert Ouimet: At Large Media
Mark Rocchio: StudioB Productions
Chris Mizzoni: StudioB Productions

Boris starts off with Giant Ant Media as an example – they have an audience of 800,000 on some of their videos, “how many of you would like an audience of 800,000?” …”and did they wait for funding? No.”

Another example is CommonCraft – their business is explaining technologies in plain English and they started doing their videos for free. They were such a success online that big companies came up to them to ask if they can create these types of videos for them, and that’s how they started to make money.

Why do you have to sit and wait for someone to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars? Why can’t you start off small?

Mark from StudioB speaks about broadcasters and how they’re moving toward including digital shorts within the licensing deals for shows or films. They’re moving in the right direction but aren’t getting much traction with tons of funding and a fancy web department, so his point is you simply need to get content out there ie. those digital shorts, which serve as a jump start.

Chris is the traditional print guy on the panel who talks about all the other things that come with book publication these days such as including a multimedia CD, making a website or even producing a podcast about a book that is to be released.

Robert is a CBC veteran touching on how broadcasting is a single outlet. He started out getting a $3 million budget for a project, which he follows up by saying “woo!” Boris pipes up to ask him if the “woo” was facetious like, “oh that’s not much” or “oh wow that’s a lot” because I think most of us here would get pretty darn excited about getting $3 million for a project, I know I would at least. Trying to tap into getting a major broadcaster to fund a project is simply one outlet you can deal with. “Get help, talk to people who have business, that may not be web businesses but are good business people.” … “Take ideas, forge business deals (that may not even be sexy) but get it done.”

Mark addresses this issue from a digital animation studio perspective, “we brought animation production back to Canada that hadn’t been here since He-Man.” He mentions that it’s actually cheaper to animate here than in the Philippines, however in the early stages of their studio they were extremely dependent on funding. “We’re still in that traditional world,” but they needed to take control of their own destiny and lead the company where it needed to go. Mark also praises Vancouver as a true hub and leader in digital media and animation.

Chris confirms as a writer/author that he writes when he can, he doesn’t even have a publisher anymore, but he still does it. Boris to Chris, “how can yo afford to just sit there and create content?” he’s being a little silly of course as Boris’ point is to produce, make content, and the rest follows.

A commenter in the audience says he’s seeing two approaches here: “Sell your soul to the devil,” and the “Colonel Sanders model where you live out of your car until you sell your recipe.” Although, the conversation is moving over to the Radiohead model, “pay what you can” to get something you want to get.

Give you users more experience, the whole “bonus features” and added value concept. Why do people pay for wifi at some locations? Convenience factor. Have an entrepreneurial mind set, don’t think about how you’re a starving Canadian artist waiting to be funded – asserts Boris, “make the content, make it excellent, that’s what will get you the eyeballs.” Think about alternative distribution channels as well.

Mark brings up convergence – being able to watch whatever you want to watch on any given monitor. Movies on XBox or the computer? Sure.

Monique, who used to work at Raincoast books, says they used to think about the book as just the beginning of the story, there was so much more to create and generate to connect people with the ideas surrounding it.

A final comment from the audience thanks Megan and Erica for all their hard work with today’s conference. On to the thank yous, a big one to Vera’s for lunch, and everyone else listed on the sponsor page. Miss604.com was also the official media sponsor, with these here live blogs.

Monetize, Monetize, Monetize!

“Where’s the money? How do we get it? Changing the mentality of the traditional business model is the name of the game. Case study examples and conversation around how building an online presence and community strengthens producers’ abilities to monetize multi-media platforms and projects.” [Bridging Media – Session]

Panelists:

Jordan Behan: Tell Ten Friends and Strutta
James Sherrett: Work Industries
Jennifer Ouano: Elastic Entertainment
Monica Moore: Telefilm Canada

Kicking off the monetization talk, there’s an introduction about the history of websites and the idea of doing business online for an audience. The example given is the Seattle Mariners website, that was the first MLB team to have a website that featured ticket purchases and schedules. Early hurdles were as simple as getting a domain name that applied as their team name was already taken so it had to be bought out.

James is the first speaker who asserts making money is not a goal – having a valuable service, making money will follow – but it is an outcome. He also bring up an essay by Kevin Kelly about what you need to understand about the web that is different – essentially that the web is a copy machine. Jennifer follows up by stating she truly dislikes the term “monetization”. The focus should be how to get money to produce the content, followed by making money from that content. Just try concepts and “see what sticks.”

Jordan speaks to his experience selling print advertising – “local advertising works because it’s relevant to you.” He uses Google Ads as an example since they are relevant to what you have done when they are presented. Also, investors want a return on said investment therefor ads are an integral part of making that happen (as Jordan passes the mic to Monica from Telefilm). “How can we create a channel that allows the advertiser to find the audience it wants.” Which segues right into James talking about AdHack, which is basically user-generated advertising, using a sort of digital word of mouth. “Mass media and mass marketing to micro media and micro marketing.”

Comment from the audience, why is advertising the model that is being focused on when it comes to monetizing? He uses an example of how some people pay to not be bothered by something or to not see ads in the first place. Jennifer brings up the other option, which is funding, and passes the mic to Monica. “We want to see that the products that we finance get the eyeballs.” Continue reading this post ⟩⟩