Bloggers I’ve met before and saw again at BlogNashville: Robin Burk, BlogNashville organizer and Media Bloggers Association President Robert Cox, Bill Roggio, (who also created Easongate.com), and Chris Nolan.
Bloggers and journalists I met: Rebecca MacKinnon, Bill Hobbs, Glenn Reynolds, J.D. Lasica, Linda Seebach, M. Roboto, Blake Wylie, Stan Brown, Trey Jackson, Tim Schmoyer, Leonard Witt, Chris Muir, Doug Petch, B.L. Ochman, Eric Janssen, and USMC_Vet.
Non- or former bloggers: Dr. Sybril Bennett, Executive Director of the New Century Journalism program, and Dr. Kirk Johnson, Heritage Foundation.
Bloggers and others who attended my faith-based blogging session: Mark Tapscott, Ed Cone, Henry Copeland, Donald Sensing, Sean Hackbarth (met at CPAC), Matt Sheffield, who also blogs at Ratherbiased.com (met at DC Blogger Meet-up), Paul Chenoweth, Dale Lature, Ian Schwartz, Eric Scheie, Cecelia Henderson, Matthew Paul Turner, and “Pink Kitty.” There were many others at the session that I didn’t meet and names I can’t remember. If I’ve left you out, please let me know.
What bloggers said about the faith-based session:
Eric Scheie: “I have to say there’s more feeling in this room right now than in any other panel I’ve experienced so far…It’s very exciting to see the independence of thought, the intelligence, and the imagination of people so often stereotyped as Bible thumping bigots….Liveliness aside, I was quite struck by the civility and lack of contentiousness at this panel, despite obvious and profound disagreement.”
Ed Cone: “Upstairs in the Vince Gill room for faith blogging, there was a lot of respect. LaShawn Barber did a nice job of keeping it open, even though she entered with some apprehension…Lots of folks took the floor….It was a coming together, and it really worked.”
I didn’t expect people to leave the session necessarily agreeing with me. Civility was what I hoped for, and that’s what I got. 
If you haven’t OD’d on BlogNashville yet, you can read what others are saying about the conference in general here.
A few months ago I complained that the same (white male) bloggers were being invited to do cable TV news interviews and speak at these conferences, then suddenly I was appearing on MSNBC and speaking at conferences.
I was actually thinking out loud when I wrote those things, but for whatever reason people noticed I was here, I’m glad. I admit that I want to be well-known in the blogosphere and a frequent conference speaker. I’ve been invited to speak at BlogHerCon in July, organized by Chris Nolan (in the photo).
I will attempt to post the rest of my photos on Flickr today, so stay tuned for updates. BlogNashville was a success, and I’m so glad Bob Cox invited me. Some bloggers aren’t interested in meeting other bloggers, but seeing them face to face and holding a verbal conversation adds another dimension to what I call “e-relationships.”
BlogNashville will go down in the history-of-the-blogosphere books as one of the defining moments of the revolutionary new medium known as blogging.
Related posts:
Update: Pictures (not mine yet)!
Oh my goodness. Sitting beside me is Bill Roggio. It looks like we’re falling asleep, but we’re not. These photos have captions. Very helpful.
Update II: I don’t know how I forgot about the lovely Andi of Andi’s World. She also attended the faith-based blogging session.
Credit for organizing BlogHerCon goes to Elisa Camahort and Lisa Stone.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 16 comments }
Actually, it’s usually the same male lawyer bloggers who appear on TV, which is why it’s great to have you, Roger L. Simon and Jeff Jarvis on TV!
Just curious…was your Nashville conference primarily conservative leaning folks or all types?
Is the BlogHer conference set up in the same fashion?
It was a good mixture of conservatives and liberals, though organized by a conservative. Bloghercon probably will be mostly liberals.
Hey! You met Linda Seebach–she is a wonderful woman and a somewhat regular attendee of our blogger parties here in Denver.
If nothing else, you met one of my favorite Denver area journalists.
Are you also going to GodBlogCon (http://smartchristian.com/)?
I just emailed you this, but the solution I blogged about in http://donsingleton.blogspot.com/2005/05/la-shawn-and-private-headers.html and posted in detail in http://bushsupporter.org/zap/zap.htm was not enough. I still have ZoneAlarmPro set to allow private headers for your site, but when I rebooted I could not see your formatting until I killed ZAP and did a refresh. I suspect I may need to add private headers for some other site. If you have any ideas let me know at donsingleton@cox.net and I will update my page showing how to fix the problem.
URL for GodBlogCon 2005 should have been http://www.godblogcon.com (at Biola University in La Mirada, California on October 15)
Yes, Don, I will be there.
Thanks for the link (and the art) LaShawn but I’ve done about as little work for Blogher.org as possible.
The credit for the heaving lifting – and they’ve done a great jobs getting this conference going – goes to Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort among others on Team Blogher.
I know I can speak for them when I thank you for the pointer and say that we’re really excited to have all these women coming to learn more about on-line writing and communicating. July 30 in Santa Clara should be fun.
Also, this is a great chance to remind folks who are interested in attending but who might not have all the cash in the world that Blogher and its supporters and sponsors are doing our best to get tickets and rooms for folks. There’s a sign-in on the site for folks who might need an assist. So don’t be shy.
Thanks again, LaShawn. Great seeing you in Nashville.
LaShawn:
I understand you’ll be doing a blogging conference (unless it was this one and I misunderstood) with Roxanne Cooper of Rox Populi.
Her blog is fantastic. Have you read it?
LaShawn, it sounds like it was a great gathering, and I so wish I could have attended! Maybe NEXT time? I’ll be linking to your post here from my blog! Thank-you for the excellent reporting/blogging! GBY!
Carla – I don’t read Roxanne’s blog as much as I should, but that will definitely change.
Thanks for the feedback, everybody.
Great! You remembered meeting me. She let me get her a drink at the party (bottled water, but still).
The worst part of this Conference was that there were far too many great people to talk to, but not enough time.
La Shawn
I sent you an email about something today that is pretty important and pretty time sensitive. Could you take a look and let me know your response?
Best Regards
LaShawn,
I just wanted to tell you what a pleasure it was to meet you. You were so kind and approachable, and did an excellent job leading the discussion. I really enjoyed the faith-based blogging session. I agree with you, meeting the bloggers adds an entirely new dimension to blogging.
I hope more people get the chance to see you in action, you are fabulous.
Warmest Regards
Thanks, Andi.
I hope I’ll have more opportunties to publicly share my faith.
I wish we could have talked more at the conference. Next time. It was great to meet you!
Lance – Which post was it?
I resent the information this morning from the same email address as above. It’s not a post but an email. An invite of sorts to participate in something I think is fairly new to the blogosphere.
Comments on this entry are closed.