In less than two weeks a bunch of us will be hanging out together at the 2008 BlogHer Conference in San Francisco! At 11:15 on Friday morning at the conference I'll be leading a "Birds of a Feather" session for "Food, Cooking, and Entertaining" bloggers, so if you're going to be attending that, I have a little homework assignment for you.

Before some of you reluctant students start complaining about having homework during the summer, let me explain. Other years on BlogHer's Agenda, "Birds of a Feather" sessions have been scheduled more informally, during a break. Since this year BlogHers will miss half of a regular session to attend the BoF meet-up, I want to be sure it's well worth your time. I've planned an activity so people can meet each other, but I also want to get you thinking about the focus of your blog, so you're primed for the two days. And we only have 40 minutes for the BoF session, so it needs to be pretty structured. (If people don't see this post before that day, the homework can also be done during class.)

Your homework assignment is to write a ten word introduction that describes your blog. It must be exactly ten words, you cannot use the exact name of the blog as part of those ten words, and you should pick the ten best possible words to capture the essence of your blog.

Depending on how many people come to the Food, Drink, and Entertaining BoF session, we'll either let participants take turns introducing themselves with their ten word statement (yes, you'll get to tell the name of your blog after you read the introduction) or if there seem to be too many particpants for that to work, we'll divide into groups and do the introductions.

Besides the quick way to introduce what your blog is about, I'm hoping some of the value of doing this will be noticing how difficult you find this homework assignment to be. Personally, I believe the best blogs are focused enough that the essence of the blog can be captured in ten words. If you're having a very hard time doing the exercise, maybe you want to think about whether your blog is focused enough. Or maybe you don't agree with me that it's important to be able to describe your blog in ten words, which is fine, but please do the exercise anyway so people can meet you. (Because our time is so short, I'm not going to let people just "introduce themselves" without a ten word statement. I'm limiting it to ten words so everyone has the same amount of time.)

Now, a good teacher always gives examples, so here's my own introduction:
South Beach Diet friendly recipes, gardening, and Weekend Herb Blogging.
Do you think that's a good description for my blog, Kalyn's Kitchen?

To have a little fun with this, I also picked three other food bloggers who'll be attending BlogHer '08 and gave them the assignment. Read their introduction, then visit the blogs and see how well you think the ten word introduction fits.

Blogger #1 says gives this description for her blog:
A food writer’s pantry: 200+ ingredients, stories, sources and recipes

Blogger #2 says this describes her blog:
Recipes, reviews, stories, food culture, and insight into culinary news

And Blogger #3 describes her blog like this:
Expat eating her way around Italy: Food, Recipes, and Travel

If anyone gets their homework done and would like to get started letting people know you'll be attending BlogHer, we'd love to see your 10-word introduction in the comments of this post. If you're going to be attending, but you need a bit more time for the homework, just leave your name and a link to your blog in the comments so we know you'll be there.

Kalyn Denny writes about food and at BlogHer.com and shares her passion for cooking at Kalyn's Kitchen.