BlogHer '10 : Agenda

Gen Y has a reputation for a totally different attitude towards work, play and passion...and the interplay between them than the rest of us. If you've been dreaming about pursuing your passion, your social media savvy already gives you a leg up. Come learn and discuss ways to make your passion “work” for you as you map out your dream career or business venture. Two twenty-something women, Jenn Korducki and Jill Felska, will provide insight into their journey from junior account executives at one of Ad Age’s Top 10 PR Agencies of the Decade to full-fledged entrepreneurs. Topics to be discussed include: determining when is the right time to venture out on your own, social media and your passion, financial and insurance issues, and the distinction between owning your job vs. owning your business. We can’t wait to start the conversation!

Seven months from now the FTC Guidelines will have been a hot topic for at least a year, and will have been “in effect” for eight months. And? So? BlogHer's co-founder and CEO, Lisa Stone, will discuss with marketer Susan Getgood, blogger Kimberly Coleman and Stacey Ferguson from the FTC whether the Guidelines have had any significant impact on how marketers and bloggers do business.

This session is about inspiration. Stretching your brain. Bringing in new resources. Triggering ideas and corralling them into something you can put down on paper, screen, video, tape. Trying new forms, new words, new styles. Opening your mind to expand what you thought you could achieve.

Writers Rita Arens, Carleen Brice and Jan Sokoloff Harness share their expert tips for successful writing strategies, time and time again.

Brought to you by Sugar, Inc.

According to the media, the fashion and beauty blog world is on fire. The hype: Bloggers are getting front-row seats at Fashion Week, they’re building goodie closets akin to Hearst or Conde Nast’s and the FTC Guidelines are a looming disaster! What’s the reality? Beauty and fashion bloggers start with a passion, just like most other bloggers. They also hold a belief that external transformation can trigger internal growth. And OK, sometimes there’s that front row seat at Fashion Week! BlogHer’s BeautyHacks managing editor, Susan Wagner, will moderate the conversation with Jennine Jacob from The Coveted and founder of the Independent Fashion Bloggers; Sarah Conley from Style IT and Nichelle Pace from STYLEMOM.

Protect your work and yourself, respect others’ work and their privacy. This session will help you learn how the law impacts your efforts as a blogger. Latoicha Givens, founder of the IP law firm Phillips Givens, LLC, and legal activist Wendy Seltzerwill focus on the nitty gritty of intellectual property law and other legal matters. We’ll discuss registering and protecting copyrights and trademarks, how to legally use others’ words and images, handling the privacy of readers who share their information with you, and the definitions of defamation, libel and slander. Learn about all of the above in theory...and see examples in practice.

Advice columns have always been amongst the most addictive daily reading for people of all ages, so there’s no better time to explore what it will take for you to create Advice 2.0 with only a blog and some common sense. Join Kelcey, Wendi and Marinka from The Mouthy Housewives, and Becky from Mommy Wants Vodka to learn how to handle every question from broken zippers to broken marriages with sensitivity and humor. We’ll discuss crafting thoughtful questions and responses to entertain readers and keep them coming back time and time again.

Brought to you by Eden Fantasys.

Did you take sex ed in high school? Did your parents give you "the talk" when you were a kid? You're an adult now, and it's time to take matters into your own hands. (Sometimes literally!) Being a better businesswoman, partner and mother is easier when you have an emotionally healthy sex life. This session discusses how to engage the Internet to its fullest potential to meet your sexual needs. Join moderator Twanna Hines, who blogs at FunkyBrownChick.com;  AV Flox, who writes at Sex and the 405; Genia Stevens, who produces Sister Talk Radio;  Mominatrix sex advice columnist, Kristen Chase; and BDSM blogger Tess Danesi, who blogs at Urban Gypsy, for a rousing and frank discussion about sex for smart women who want to improve their lives. Takeaways include but are not limited to:

• How can I safely and/or anonymously experiment with my sexual identity online?
  Where are the best Web resources for sexual health information?
  Can the Internet save my relationship?

Despite what kind of camera you choose to shoot with, all you need in order to learn how to take the best photos possible is a good teacher. Enter Mishelle Lane and Rachel Devine, who swear by their DSLRs, and Lotus Carroll, who loves the results she gets from her point-and-shoot. The trio will discuss composition, lighting, self-portraits, using photography to improve your blog, and much, much more.

We’ll talk about the intersection of your personal and professional lives online and how it impacts your work. How do you resolve the two? What is the proper balance between creating a personal brand online and revealing too much? What are the professional ramifications of your personal brand? Hear from folks who think anything goes. And those who are…unconvinced, to say the least. Moderator and technology advocate Shireen Mitchell hashes it out with HR professional Jessica Lee, writer and techie Sarah Granger, who has blogged openly about her chronic pain, and social media enthusiast Stephanie Bergman.

Where is the line between telling a good story and telling a lie? Can “authenticity” and “great writing” both be watchwords? What exactly do you owe your audience? Are we going to start having a badge system for disclosure about how much and which parts of our stories are true, mostly true, or greatly exaggerated for dramatic (or comedic) effect? BlogHer co-founder Jory Des Jardins moderates this revealing session with Jenny Lawson and Julie Marsh. All three women deal with this on a personal level every time they blog about marriage, life, family, work and more.

If you believe taking great photos is the end of the line, think again. Any great photographer will tell you that it’s not enough to know basic photography rules – you’ve got to know how to edit those photos to make them really “pop”. Whether you’re using the latest version of Photoshop or a freebie program online, Pauline/OHMommy, Amy from The Bitchin' Wives Club and Ryan Marshall from Pacing the Panic Room will walk you through basic editing using brightening and contrast, color enhancement, adjusting hues and saturation levels, artistic additions, cropping, blurring, watermarking, editing file sizes and more.

The number of women and girls playing sports is at an all-time high, with almost 94% of all girls aged 6-17 playing sports of some kind. Yet, even thought participation has increased so dramatically, the media coverage of women's athletics has not. The lack of coverage of female athletes and sports in the mass media helps shape the cultural image of them being absorbed by our daughters...that 94% of girls who play. The world of social media brings hope, however, and now female athletes, sportswriters and fans can have a voice. Put together, we can be pretty loud. Who's listening? Join Megan Hueter, Co-Founder of WomenTalkSports.com, Sarah Braesch, longtime sportsblogger at BlogHer and Draft Day Suit, and Kelly Mazzante, two-time WNBA Chamption with the Phoenix Mercury, to answer that question.

When Michelle Obama visited the Department of Labor early this year, she extolled the balance of family-friendly workplaces. But when will things really change? There is a small but powerful group of women and men online, such as Stephanie Wilchfort and Morra Aarons-Mele, who are broadening their reach and blogging about how to change the way all Americans, men and women, work. We’re talking about shifting the conversation from one about work/life balance, since those inevitably reflect a struggle to adapt current family realities to the old world where one parent worked, one stayed at home. Change is hard – but bloggers have a platform from which to advocate, persuade and activate. Discuss how to harness our power as bloggers to change one of the most fundamental parts of our lives.

More and more bloggers are exploring how to stay true to themselves while still taking advantage of the opportunities that blogging brings. Some bloggers may be in a niche that practically requires such consideration...think Green Bloggers or Breastfeeding Activist, but every blogger has their own value system to live up to. How do you know which monetization method is right for you, and your values? We’ll talk to Amy Lupold Bair, Marta Wohrle, Megan Jordan and Micaela Preston about how they weigh opportunities against their value system and come out on the other end, comfortable in their own skin.

We all know bloggers want to become authors. But with traditional publishers spending less and less on marketing, authors must now become marketers, and that means they must become bloggers too...sometimes they take to it eagerly, sometimes dragged kicking and screaming. Add to the mix how much easier than ever it is to self-publish and the book bloggers who are now being wooed by publishers and even authors directly, and you've got a new publishing eco-system.

The solitary pursuits of writing and criticism are now transparent and sometimes even crowd-sourced. And more authors and critics are now not only the content producers, but their own publishers and business development representatives. The lines are decidedly blurred. But the opportunities seem so much more accessible than ever. We will dig into it all in this session featuring Kamy Wicoff from She Writes, book blogger Florinda, marketing expert Penny Sansevieri, and author Carleen Brice.

Make your blog work for you, no matter how big or small it is. Size doesn't have to matter as long as you are getting what you want and need from your blog. Mayberry Mom, Celeste
Lindell/Average Jane and moderator Nora Leibowitz will talk about how to identify what it is you really want and care about, and how you can be true to that and still grow, sanely, if you want that too. For new bloggers, bloggers who don't feel like they fit into any category or "vertical", or even for long-time bloggers who reached a plateau and aren't sure how to feel about it.

More and more of our community are using Wordpress. Ed Donahue and Shazia Mistry will focus on taking your blog design and layout to new heights, getting into the nuts and bolts of everything beyond basic HTML and CSS.

Creating a WordPress Theme, led by Shazia Mistry
Learn to create a magazine-style website with WordPress and Thematic. Thematic is a WordPress framework theme, with 13 widget-ready sidebars. In the session we will be dismantling an existing blog - taking a close look at the WordPress tags and templates that makes up a dynamic and highly functional website. Prerequisites: Previous experience modifying WordPress themes, working knowledge of html, css, php (as it applies to WordPress development).

Modifying a WordPress theme, led by Ed Donahue
Take a look under the hood of your WordPress theme to take your blog to new heights. Learn about the required elements of a WordPress theme and how to modify them to fit into your blog’s unique visual style. Prerequisites: Previous experience with WordPress.org or WordPress.com, some familiarity with CSS, HTML and PHP is a plus.

These are workshop-type sessions; if you're coming with a laptop, feel free to have a sandbox WordPress installation ready, and thematic downloaded and activated as your active theme. Come with your existing WordPress issues.

Maybe you want to work with big brands. Maybe you want to work with top PR agencies. Maybe you just want to talk with others about your blog without drawing a blank and searching the floor for the right response. You need to develop your elevator pitch, both written and oral. Your written pitch is for contacting those companies that you want to partner with you and your site. Your oral pitch is what you say when you’re asked that one question, time and time again: “So, what do you blog about?”

Bring your notebook, your laptop, your voice and your willingness to practice your pitch with Lucretia Pruitt and Jenn Fowler, who started out practicing pitching on each other, and realized they could help others get better at it too.