BlogHer07: The Aftermath

So I'm back from BlogHer 07, both the conference and the unconference. As with BlogHer Business in March, this was a fantastic experience for me. I'm still exhausted, so this post probably won't be all that coherent, but bear with me.

Highlights:

• Seeing all the awesome faces I remembered from March, and seeing that they remembered me too. :)
  
  
• Attending some incredible, energizing, thought provoking sessions and getting great ideas for working with communities, blogs, SEO, and just tons more.
  
  
• Watching Jen take on the task of working a room filled with 800 women she'd never met before. It was like nothing I'd ever seen. Girl is a force of nature. I would leave her alone for 5 minutes, and when I came back she'd have found 10 more contacts she planned to follow up with on some project they'd cooked up together in their 300 seconds of conversation. Unbelievable.
  
  
• Listening to Elizabeth Edwards speak in the closing keynote.
  
  
• The W Lakeshore.
  
  
• Going to a fantastic reception at the Chicago Children's museum.
  
  
• The Swag.
  
  
• The absolute highlight for me, though, was the Unconference on Sunday. It was an incredibly interactive, open session where we all discussed what we felt like discussing. It was really fantastic to hear the voices of the Joe Average bloggers, just like me, who have incredible contributions to make. I really found this session the most valuable of the whole weekend, and keep in mind I thought Friday and Saturday were awesome.
  
  

Lowlights:

• Seeing some disappointed faces when they found only "M" t-shirts at the Dove craft tables. Although I think Dove probably didn't intend to have anyone wear the shirts they made and thus didn't think about diversity of sizes, I think it unintentionally gave some folks a feeling of exclusion, which sucks.
  
  
• Seeing someone say to the Dove representative at the craft table, "it was really, really, REALLY stupid of you to only have medium T-shirts." Constructive feedback should always be welcome in any situation. That wasn't what I really called constructive.
  
  
• Being way too exhausted and headachey to go party Saturday night. Phooey.