Blogs and Conferences and Women Oh My!

I think it was around 10-12 years ago I started a blog on blogspot called chunkofunk. It was a secret back then, helping me wade through banality of a job I didn’t like and secretly connect with a group of people that for reasons unknown, I still kind of know.  I wrote stories, I wrote open and honestly about every light and dark side of my being and, of course, I wrote about sex.  It was fun for many reasons.

As blogging began to get more popular and less anonymous I deleted all the text in a fit of drama. I am sad for these academy award winning moments because it would be interesting to go back and read where my head was at back then, and I think there was some solid writing in there.

Next, because I was heading off to Australasia for a year with my wife and son, I wanted to document our journey and keep us connected to those we loved, I blogged about it here. It was a great way for all the people we knew to follow our spectacular journey and comment back and forth.  They all loved it because they were able to follow along and live vicariously through our wondrous eyes or shake their head in gritted teeth envy.  Either way, it worked for us.

I subsequently started a couple of other blogs, gary on the kick drum, chunkofunk on Tumblr, both deleted again in a fit of – hand across my brow dramatics  – thinking a clean slate is better than one filled with wacky whimsical worrisome alliteration.

This is 7-10 years of writing floating somewhere in the digital ether.  Le sigh.

Last year I started another one, here which remains semi-dormant as I have taken most of my literary energy and placed it here, as the resident dad blogger at UrbanMoms. This gig has afforded me a number of different opportunities, both professionally and personally. I was able to increase my writing-based community with a few talented, lovely and warm people and I was able attach my writing to a couple of different projects that actually included compensation.

The writing is different, not as peppered with profanity or laced with lascivious as it used to be which is both ok and not ok, as sometimes my real voice is lost in fear of alienating my new audience. I now specifically write for an audience where my original blogging did not, and then it did again as my readers increased and my anonymity disappeared.

I miss the anonymity sometimes, but am so driven by the approval of others starting an anonymous blog again is so idealistic and pointless. I would start commenting on my own posts just to make myself feel better.

Why am I writing this?  Well, I am going to Blissdom this weekend.  A social media conference for women.  And I am bit nervous.

I have been to very few conferences in my day.  For whatever reason, these educational-based experiences were assigned to someone else or the timing and/or resources made them unavailable to me. The increase in social media-based conferences has increased at the same rate as the participation of these new and exciting communication channels.  I get many many emails a day asking me to attend various conferences around the world touting various experts at measurement, search engine optimization, the monetization of social media, how to write tweets more effectively, how to increase my brand through hangouts, through discussion pages, how to increase my score, my hits, my comments, my likes.

All little tidbits of information that I really do find interesting, but find challenging to cultivate the swarm of these little communication wasps, weaving around my brain, trying to find a different lobe to sting.

So I am going to this conference with an open mind, trying not to step on any open-toed shoes and being as friendly as possible, trying not to drink through my anxiety.

I am here to learn more about the blogging craft, more about others and how they approach blogging and their own personal writing expression.

It just so happens 97 per cent of them will be female.

All I know is if I had a wing person that liked pints and French fries I would feel a lot better.