BlogHer in Chicago this year

Robert Scoble's post today about BlogHer, a blogging community for women, reminded me of my interview last year with Elisa Camahort, one of the three founders of the site.

BlogHer is having their conference this year from July 27-29 in Chicago.

Last year's conference in San Jose was a big hit and drew more than 700 attendees. And Elisa was really friendly and very accessible when I set out to do a story on the conference for Red Herring magazine.

What surprised me was not just the size of the community or how active it was but that many big name advertisers had realized the potential of that audience and were rushing to sponsor the event. You can see some of the fun schwag the attendees got last year in my story.

Good luck to BlogHer and all its attendees for this year's conference.

Here's the article I wrote last year after the BlogHer conference in San Jose. Since the link on the Red Herring website requires registration I am posting the whole story here.

She-Blogs
Hugs, kisses, and finely manicured feet were in abundance at Silicon Valley’s latest technology conference. But the 700-plus mostly female attendees of the second annual BlogHer conference weren’t there just to socialize.

Major advertisers like General Motors, Yahoo, and Johnson & Johnson were watching closely, eager to tap into a potentially big marketing opportunity. “This is probably the most important women’s media network,” says Elisa Camahort, president of events and marketing for BlogHer.

Indeed, 46 percent of bloggers in the United States are women, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project last month. “While women still aren’t writing and reading blogs as often as men, we’re catching up, especially when it comes to reading blogs at least weekly,” Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research, wrote recently in her blog.

The number of attendees at this year’s BlogHer conference, held in San Jose, California on July 28-29, more than doubled over last year. BlogHer is hoping to leverage those numbers to transform itself into a powerful online presence.

The site’s 4,000 bloggers post on topics ranging from health, food and drink, religion and spirituality, to “mommy & family.” The Palo, Alto, California-based company, founded by Ms. Camahort and her partners, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins, launched an ad network for the site on June 1. The “Mommy Bloggers,” as many of the community’s members are known, are becoming a huge draw for corporate America, says Ms. Stone.

“Women control 83 percent of household spending,” she says. “Online, many of these women are having conversations about what they want to buy, what they want to read, and what they like—conversations that are difficult to find elsewhere.”

If you want to know what women really want, the BlogHer swag bag could offer clues. Among the items: a bib, a 64-MB USB JumpDrive, a fast food book, a notebook, a pen, and an Elexa condom.