BlogHer: How the web’s number one guide to blogging by women was grown from the ground up.

Elisa Camahort Page

Co-founder and COO, BlogHer

How BlogHer started
In early 2005 there was a recurring theme in media: Where are the women? And that question was being asked about bloggers, even though women comprised nearly half the bloggers and more than half the internet users even at that time. My two business partners and I decided that instead of “talking” about it (via our blogs, we would do something: throw a conference for women bloggers and see who showed up. We blogged the idea, and the response was immediate, passionate and positive. 120 days later we had a sold-out conference that had gotten major media and blogosphere attention.

- Why do women bloggers matter?
Women are not only half the internet users and bloggers out there, they control the household dollar on purchases ranging form technology to cars to what we put on the table. We call blogging the “gateway drug” to technology, because it’s relatively easy for non-programmers and non-engineers to get started. Once people do get started, though, it opens a world of new opportunities for them. Blogging has cultivated a community of “self taught geeks” who become hooked on how easy it is to blog and thus become part of a community and dialogue. This phenomenon is helping to bridge the gap in the adoption digital divide (as opposed to an economic digital divide) which is beneficial as technology becomes more important to our society. Those who are more technically savvy have a definite edge over those who aren’t as quick to adopt it. Blogging is becoming an easy way for people to become involved in using technology and is opening up a wealth of learning and professional opportunities. Everyday people who start their own blogs are now even learning how to write code and build applications, something that only true geeks did only a few years ago.

-What kind of activities does BlogHer engage in today?
We continue to do conference. But we’ve branched out into a full-blown media hub for women bloggers, covering every issue under the sun, and supporting women to transform their personal, professional and political lives via blogging and other social media technologies. In addition, we are all about helping women make money doing something they are good at, and that they love. Hence we introduced the BlogHer Advertising Network, which now reaches nearly 8 million unique visitors a month across nearly 1200 network blogs.

How to be a part of the BlogHer community:

Join BlogHer: http://www.blogher.com/user/register
List your blogs in BlogHer’s blog directories: http://blogher.org/node/add/weblink
Blog on the site: http://www.blogher.com/all-posts
Attend a conference: http://blogher.com/conference
Subscribe to our newsletters: http://www.blogher.com/sign-bloghers-email-newsletters
Join our ad network…opening up again in February 2008: http://blogherads.com

Show Notes RELATED WEBSITE LINKS (to be used on web)
BlogHer’s ChangeThis Manifesto tells the story of our first conference and how women bloggers are changing their world using this technology: http://changethis.com/29.05.WomenBloggers