Finding a New Voice BlogHer ‘07

So could blogging become my new voice or is this just an amplified version of my existing one? Well, it’s all in how you look at it I think. With this in mind, I, like over 700 women bloggers (and some brave men) converged on Chicago this past weekend to explore the world that they have created. The 2007 BlogHer conference was to cater to female bloggers and the issues and challenges they share. BlogHer as an organization brings women bloggers together online. This conference brought them together in the real world – it was enlightening and energizing.

These talented, sometimes quirky, but, considerably intelligent women opened this year’s conference with the theme “A World of Difference.” The theme was chosen to coordinate with the launch of the BlogHers Act initiative which will focus on making some changes related to global health. The primary conversations between attendees seemed to circle around similar themes: the caring, feeding, and good stewardship of their online communities and what is owed to their readership to maintain a healthy community.

This brings me to another interesting question. If women in fact control the family dollar “everywhere” and they make up 50% of the population and are now fully strapped with RSS feeds, a significant knowledge of effective tagging, and SEO standards; will they use their power to make significant changes? I would say the future seems promising. The technology is being embraced like mother’s milk. Fearlessly, but sometimes tentatively, they work to move this segment of the blogosphere forward, while always keeping in mind the generations that have come before them. They are the hope and the dream of their grandmothers.

So could blogging be my new voice? I suspect my voice will always be my own; it’s all in the way I choose to power it.