It's back!

Last year we tried something new. The closing keynote for Day One of the annual conference was our first-ever Community Keynote. We opened up a call for submissions of your very favorite posts (your own or by your favorite bloggers) and our selection committee narrowed down the hundreds of submissions to about 20. And those bloggers stood at the mic and read their posts aloud to all 1,100 BlogHer '08 attendees.

We laughed. We cried. We were reminded how diverse and talented and amazing and powerful the blogosphere really is.

It was kind of a no-brainer that we were going to make that Community Keynote experiment a new BlogHer tradition.

The story remains pretty much the same: The closing keynote for Day One of the conference will be live blog readings from the BlogHer community itself. You'll submit your favorite posts, and we'll get 20 of you at the microphone sharing that favorite post with the entire BlogHer crowd.

Our MC remains Eden Kennedy, and here's how it's going to work for 2009:

1. There will be five categories of submissions/readings:

2. We are asking you to submit your favorite post that can be read in no more than four minutes in any of the above categories. This year we will be timing them!

3. You must be registered for BlogHer '09 to submit your posts for the Community Keynote.

4. Eden is, once again, working with a committee to go through submissions. This year we will start what we hope is a new tradition: Readers from last year's Community Keynote are not eligible to re-submit, but we did invite five of those inaugural Community Keynoters to give back and be on the selection committee this year. They all happily accepted the challenge!! Send your submission to Eden, cc'ing the three general committee members listed below PLUS cc'ing the applicable Category committee member from the second list.

Your submission should include:

Submission Subject Line:
BlogHer '09 Community Keynote Submission [Category]

(...with the appropriate category filled in. This will help us properly file and find submissions.)

Submission Body:
Name (as you'd like it to be published/announced)
Blog URL
Favorite Post URL and its Category

General Community Keynote Committee
Eden Kennedy at: fussy@fussy.org
Elisa Camahort Page at elisa@blogher.com
Jes Ferris at jes@blogher.com
Lori Luna at lori@blogher.com

Category Community Keynote committee members:

5. There will be 4 readings chosen per category, ensuring that we feature work about a wide variety of topics and from a diverse group of bloggers. The criteria? Well, it will vary according to category, but the basics are:

Did it make us laugh?
Did it make us cry?
Did it make nod our head in an "I've been there" kind of way?
Did it make us want to send the link to a bunch of other people to share the bloggy goodness?
Is it fresh, unique...in other words, could it only have come from you?

6. The timeline:

7. One last thing: Question: Can you nominate your favorite post by someone else?

Answer: Yes, if you know that person is registered for the conference and can be there to read it, and you know they won't kill you for nominating them.

8. And to repeat, for good measure, the most important piece of instruction above: Send your submission to Eden, cc'ing the three general committee members listed PLUS cc'ing the applicable Category committee member from the second list.

So, get to it! We cannot wait to start reading the Best. Posts. Ever. for the BlogHer Community Keynote event.