BlogHer Room of Your Own Panel Proposed on Resource Blogging- Please Vote!

In the midst of all the snow that has come to DC this past week and is forecasted for this weekend, you can’t blame me for thinking ahead to summer and my 3rd trip to BlogHer.

BlogHer is a blogging conference for women and the handful of brave men who attend each year to connect with each other outside our blog readers and Twitter and learn. As a teacher, I’m a big believer in attending the conference to further my own knowledge so I’m just as excited about a weekend with my bloggy friends as I am about learning from them.

One way I can connect and learn through others is by hosting a Room of Your Own (ROYO) session about resource blogging. Room of Your Owns aren’t formal panels but rather a chance for those with a common interest to come together, discuss, and learn from each other.

The fabulous Jessica McFadden (yes, that’s us with Grover at BlogHer in 2007!), who you probably know from A Parent in Silver Spring (because she’s a celebrity among moms in the DC area!), proposed a ROYO session about resource blogging that will feature the us along with Jean Winegardner (AutMont and Stimeyland) and Susan Niebur (Mothers With Cancer, Women in Planetary Science and Toddler Planet).

Jean (pictured left with Kristen’s baby), Susan, Jessica, and I have tons in common but use our blogs to share information with others. As Jessica says, “ We’re all passionate about using blogs to share information with others. Whether we’re writing about activities for families, appropriate technology for families, autism awareness and events, support for mothers fighting cancer or women scientists in male-dominated fields, we’re all online A LOT because of our passions.”

Rooms of Your Own are determined by votes. We aren’t compensated for hosting nor is there a special host swag bag like Oscar presenters used to receive. We just want to share our knowledge and meet other resource bloggers to learn from them. That’s it. So if you could please vote for our Room of Your Own session, we’d love it! Thanks!

Here’s how to vote:

• If you’re already a registered reader, member or user of BlogHer.com, please vote for us here.

• If you’re not familiar with BlogHer, you can quickly register in order to vote. As Jessica says, “If you’ve been thinking about starting your own blog, oh my gosh, this site is such a great free resource! And the contributors to BlogHer.com are top notch. Warning – you’ll be sucked in reading here all day. It’s top-caliber writing by amazing women…and some men too.”

Here’s the official text we submitted:

Resource Blogging – Serving Communities One Post At a Time

As blogging has gained momentum, more individuals and groups are seeing it as an effective, powerful means to communicate information communities need.
Many BlogHer attendees have started blogs

• to serve their local communities
• assist persons online with whom they share a circumstance or concern
• or fill an information void through the power of the blog

Some of us are established bloggers with separate resource blogs begun after learning of a need through our personal blogs, such as Mothers With Cancer, which grew out of the support needs Susan Niebur and 20 other mothers with cancer identified as they blogged their own battles with cancer on their personal blogs. Others are mission-based bloggers who joined the blogging world when we had an idea and saw blogging as the ideal communication tool for our communities, such as Tech Savvy Mama, Leticia Barr’s website which she started to help parents navigate technologies for their children.

However all resource bloggers are driven by a desire to teach, build networks, and create support systems in their own areas of interest. Resource blogs are started not necessarily because of a personal need to write and create, but a need to serve.

Resource blogger Jessica McFadden of A Parent in Silver Spring, a local website that has gained national attention for providing information for parents in the Washington DC area, will be facilitating discussions on how individuals can launch their own effective and easy public relations campaigns to reach their communities and the media.

This Room is not about blogs as businesses, or resource blogs that have primarily entrepreneurial and profit-based goals. (Although discussions of ad revenue, personal gratification, or professional opportunities that grow out of resource blogs may be appropriate.) Let’s gather to discuss and highlight the biggest, most important rewards of resource blogging: effectively impacting and connecting with our communities.

Passion for our resource topics, and effecting positive change in our communities is what brings us back to the keyboards, day in and day out.

Let’s talk about why we do it, how we can do it better, how we can better reach our communities, and brainstorm with and support those BlogHer attendees thinking about beginning their own resource blogs.

If at the end of the session new URLs are born that inform and serve others, oh (wo)man, how awesome would that be?