horsepigcow

I wanted to capture my post-workout lines here…[warning: personal reflection post ahead]

In just over two weeks, I’m turning 34.

34.

Not old, really, but I feel like so much about my body has changed in the past couple of years. It’s hard to describe and the changes have been both positive and negative, and they wouldn’t be too diagnosable by a physician. Just changes.

Like on the negative, I’ve been experiencing semi-frequent migraines. They suck. I remember my mom having them about 10 years ago. She seemed to suffer quite a bit and now I know why. I’ve also been experiencing heightened ‘ditziness’ – clumsiness at times and forgetting people’s names and words…or the point I was trying to make mid-sentence. According to my mom, this is what she experienced as well. Between the sage wisdom I’ve gained over my years of experience (lol), I sound like a complete bimbo. I’ve been using ‘HorsePigCow’ more and more (see my About page for further explanation).

On the positive side, my body, especially my upper body, seems to be getting stronger. I can do more pushups, lift more and it even appears more muscly (although I need to work on making it look that way to others). My aerobic ability has also increased quite a bit. All of my life, I couldn’t run at all. I hated it. It was painful and tedious. Just today I got on the treadmill after not working out for a month and a half (and doing anaerobic activities like pilates before that) and ran at a brisk pace for 20 minutes without breathing hard at all.

Of course there is also the skin changes as well as the persistent ‘tire’. From what I hear, this is worsened by stress (someone say Vitamin B will help keep that at Bay). My obsession with skin care has kept Sephora and La Mer in business and I’m growing more and more interested in stuff like ‘supplements’ and ‘homeopathic remedies’. Yikes!

I know I have a few female readers out there, so I’m wondering what you’ve noticed changing and when it started for you (guys experience this, too, so feel free to pipe in…I’m interested in how things change for you). Mine probably started about 2 years ago, but has been quite acute for the past year. There are so many positive things about being my age. So many things I’d love to go back and tell myself at 24. Of course I would also scold that 24 year old for smoking, sunning (although I was always careful with my fair skin) and drinking so heavily, but that’s the 34 year old mom in me.

I think it is good that I can’t, though. It would take the awe and amazement out of the discoveries now. When I was 24, I thought life was grande. It would have ruined it for me to see an even grander vision in the future.

::oh, and I should add, I think my 24 year old self would be totally jealous of me. Awesome, way cool 14 year-old son, super hunky 26 year-old boyfriend, amazing friends, living in a cool city, about to celebrate the first year anniversary of a great business of and a lifestyle of giving that I’m way proud of. I should really spare her the envy and let her discover her agency for herself.

In Montreal this weekend to catch up with some girlfriends and the Jazz Fest over the weekend after enjoying some meetings and a geek lunch, organized by WikiTravel’s Evan Prodromou:

TIME: Friday, June 29 at 1PM

WHERE: Laïka at 4040 blvd St. Laurent near the corner of Duluth.

See you there? [next stop: Calgary July 2-4]

p.s. Thanks Evan!

In the second I read this (or the change from ‘In a relationship/married’ to ‘it’s complicated’), I feel:

• Connected to that person: I’ve been there. I can only imagine how sad it was (or elated, depending on the ended relationship).
• Connected to Chris: I remember that, even though we fight sometimes, it’s important to work hard on our relationship because it is so important to me and I’d hate to have it reduced to a Facebook newsfeed notification alongside someone adding a new app.

Love relationships are still the most interesting, telling pieces of our human lives. This little newsfeed feature is both revolutionary (it opens up our lives to one another in fantastically vulnerable ways…ways in which are, I think, helpful) and frightening (reducing it to a notification trivializes the heartache around this event – how often do we reach out to our friends when we see this notification to get the full story and comfort them like true friends?).

Thanks to Ryanne & Jay (co-founders of The Hat Factory) for putting this together! I think they did an awesome job of capturing the essence of what Coworking is.

Being that Chris and I have done some work with the good folks at O’Reilly this past year, we were lucky enough to be invited back to FOO Camp (this was Chris’ first year). Chris seemed to be co-chairing every session (he has his hands in many things right now) and I got into a few of them myself. One of them, “Can we measure community health?” was a particularly excellent roundtable discussion and I wanted to share some of my notes here.

First off, FOO discussions don’t really happen in a bubble. The themes discussed at FOO have been on the minds and lips of people all over our industry. What FOO Camp gives us is the chance to gather with people from far and wide and diverse communities and backgrounds to discuss this. David Crow, one of the stewards of the Toronto BarCamp community was my co-conspirator on the discussion (it was his suggestion as we drove up to Sebastapol). The brilliant Linda Stone was there to offer her wisdom. My good friend and amazing community leader, Kathy Sierra, was part of the discussion. Jono Bacon, manager of the worldwide community of Ubuntu, was there to tell his stories. Mitchell Baker attended and offered the Mozilla Foundation perspective (and blogged about how all over the place the discussion was…it certainly was!). I even pulled David Recordon and Chris in to see if OpenID would fit in the mix.

The challenge that we face when we sit down and talk about community is how deeply personal community is to each of us. We all have unique experiences of it and, for those of us who are part of tight communities, we feel emotionally connected to those experiences and the people we experience with. So we bring our nuances to the table. As Mitchell noted, we certainly didn’t stay ‘on topic’ and definitely didn’t come up with any definitive answer to how to measure the health of a community. And it is a topic that we are all thinking about and I’ve heard mentioned from many different people who work in this industry:

How do we measure the success of a community? (I call it ‘health’ because that is how I define success…it is more open to individual interpretation and denotes a different metric than size, which I don’t think is a proper indicator of success.)

You see the crazy notes above that aren’t really in any order, but for those of us who continued the conversation after our hour was up, we came up with these loose points:

• Every community is unique. The indicators of health in the open source and international community of Ubuntu are quite different from the ones in the photography community of Flickr.
• Furthermore, after a community grows to a certain point, it becomes a microcosm of multiple communities. You see within Flickr that many of the groups have become (or represent) individual communities that benefit from the platform of Flickr (and the larger community) to thrive (and vice versa).
• The word ‘community’ happens when there are symbiotic relationships – people giving and receiving. The health of the community is maintained by balancing the two. This may be the closest to universal as we get. (feedback?)
• Measuring a community should never be a metric of VALUE. Rather, it needs to reflect a metric of PERSONALITY, HEALTH and SERVICE (i.e. we discussed the observation of attrition and making sure we find ways, especially for newbie members, to reduce the number of those lost).
• Another measurement to consider as potentially universal is the length of time between someone being a newbie and an expert and the ease of that process.
• Metrics really are the way that we bridge the culture gap between community and the corporate. Some communities may never need to measure because they don’t require funding, etc., but many communities do. If we, as having the interest of the community before the interest of the corporate, want to build those bridges, it is better for us to come up with metrics than for the corporations to impose theirs.
• People belong to multiple communities and increase and decrease their activity and commitment to each over time. This ebbing and flowing should not be seen as a measure as much as an organic process. The better way to look at this is the ease of which you allow these cycles to occur and how well you work with other networks who do the same.

So, it is a start. Post discussion, I was asked to start jotting all of this down on a wiki that O’Reilly is compiling a book on Community…but I haven’t received the link for it yet. I will post it here when I get it.

Feel free to add your anecdotes, arguments and general thoughts in the comments below.

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Godwin’s Law

The image above illustrates, to me, the level of frenzy community members get into as they become more and more emotionally involved in a community. I’m not entirely sure what the member is protesting here as there didn’t seem to be any clear direction to a specific instance, but from what I’ve heard through the grapevine, it has something to do with nudity on Flickr. I’ve always thought it was ridiculous to censor artistic nudity, but some of what I’ve been witness to on Flickr crosses the line between art and porn. Still, it doesn’t bother me personally. I’m pretty much neutral on the porn thing (although I find most of it extremely boring and non-titillating…probably because it’s not made for me). I also don’t tend to censor what my son consumes (and if he were a daughter, I wouldn’t either), I just hope my lessons of respect for women over-ride any of the objectified ones.

But this isn’t the point, really.

The point is hot buttons. And you know that you have an emotionally invested community when someone can yell “Fire!” (or, in this case Nazis, Censorship and Control) and cause a real ruckus.

I’ve cited McMillan & Chavis’ work on Sense of Community in many of my presentations, but I don’t think I’ve ever pointed to it here. There are, basically, four ‘senses’, each one forming a deeper bond that occur:

1. Sense of Membership
2. Feelings of Influence
3. Integration and Fulfillment of Needs
4. Shared Emotional Connection

I describe this journey into a deeper and deeper sense of community in the way you may recall entering any social group. In the beginning, you recognize commonalities (dress, language, symbols, etc.) that make you feel like you’ve ‘come home’…that this group can understand who you are: sense of membership. There is also a basic feeling of safety, but you don’t give yourself completely yet. You are hanging around, picking up on the gestures, the signs. That’s the level of Influence that is taking place. This is when you start communicating. You make a statement and see how it is responded to. You feel listened to. You are also learning from the group. You are starting to ‘fit in’. As you fit in more and more, the rewards are piling up. You feel status over time, you are working together towards accomplishing something. More and more trust happens. You are integrated and your needs (as well as the groups) are being fulfilled. You feel secure and safe and can rely on one another and you are more than happy to do your part.

Shared emotional connection is tough. It takes time and/or crisis to really gel. M&C list the following as ways that a community forms the emotional connection:

1. Contact. The more face to face stuff, the deeper the connection.
2. Quality of interaction. Hard to judge, but think of team-building exercises where you are actually having to work together toward a true end. Where you have to really trust one another.
3. Closure to events. Ambiguous interactions don’t tend to drive groups together as much as definitive events.
4. Shared events. Crisis. Life and death. Banding together.
5. Investment of time and energy. Um…it just takes time and dedication…
6. Honor and humiliation. Those in the community honored will feel closer, humiliated with retaliate, bringing others together.
7. Spiritual bond. Hard to define

This is the point at which ‘hot buttons’ have a real impact. They trigger both the ‘Honor and humiliation’ as well as the ‘Shared events’ (crisis) points and they both drive a wedge between community members as well as bring them closer together.

Why Nazis, Censorship and Control tend to come up so frequently is that they are the kind of ‘agreed upon’ enemies that almost everyone can get behind to fight. All three causes a strong, visceral reaction that flies in the face of what we discuss as holding dear.

But what is actually happening in these communities is usually a far cry from Nazi politics, censorship and controlling behavior. It’s usually misunderstandings and reactions, defensiveness and over-reactions that are hyperbolized far beyond what is really happening between multiple well-meaning, but obviously frustrated parties. Human beings have fragile egos and everyone has a stake in making things the way they are.

In fact, even if you don’t think you have a stake, you do. Years ago, I read an amazing book called The Dance of Anger, which is targeted at women’s relationships, but I’ve passed it along to many others. The basic thesis is that we get comfortable with the negative patterns in our relationships. That, much like a security blanket, we hang onto these patterns because we know them well. I held onto these patterns for many years with my parents and have strangled past relationships by being too comfortable with these patterns. And, as soon as you recognize it and try to break free from it, your ‘dance partner’ will fight extremely hard to return you both to that comfortable pattern.

Lately, I’ve been witness to a whole lot of online communities stuck in awful dances of anger. The irony of the photo above is that it is hosted on Flickr by a non-Pro user…one who, ostensibly, has nothing to lose by just voting with their account deletion (there are also exporting tools available for the photos), but everything to win by participating in this dance of anger (shared events). But Flickr is the best of these deeply emotionally connected communities. I think the Flickr team does an amazing job of keeping their cool. They may make some unpopular decisions, but they take full responsibility and provide a strong leadership that moves on from the dances.

I’d love to hear from you regarding ways you’ve transcended the Dance of Anger, tips you have for ‘keeping your cool’ and whether or not it is important to expose fallacies (like censorship, etc.) or just walk away…and how do you walk away and help people feel listened to?

Either blog these tips or respond below.

Indeed, it’s perilous to chase growth across borders. Because a global market’s dimensions are wider and less defined than a nation’s or a region’s, firms face a higher risk of frittering away the advantages they have secured on smaller playing fields. If a company wants to grow and still maintain superior returns, the appropriate strategy is to assemble and dominate a series of discrete but preferably contiguous markets and then expand only at their edges.

Bruce Greenwald, All Strategy is Local

We talk a great deal about taking risks at Citizen Agency, but what we really mean to encourage is taking smart and responsible risks. I know, it sounds a bit like a cop-out, but it isn’t.

Years ago, I had a very lovely consultancy in my hometown of Calgary, Alberta called Rogue Strategies. It was pretty young, but cooking right along…starting to win awards and launch pretty significant campaigns that were getting good attention. A smart move would have been for me to use that to my advantage to continue to grow in my current market and start to edge a little ways outside of it…pitching clients in the markets closeby. Instead, I got cocky and jumped right over to Toronto, where I thought the action was. Heck, I was moving and shaking in Calgary, why not Toronto? Wrong. Quickly, I noticed that I was a fish out of water. The landscape was entirely different. There were new players and attitudes and politics I didn’t know how to navigate through. I would meet people who were excited about my work, but, ultimately, I didn’t have a reputation in the market, so I was an unsafe bet. I had few contacts and even fewer opportunities. It all imploded after about 8 months and I took a job with a part-time client of mine. I learnt a great deal.

Starting Rogue Strategies was a great risk. I knew people in Calgary. I had worked on campaigns there and had loyal customers. People knew what I was capable of, so they were more willing to take a risk on me, too. Sure, it could have imploded there, too, but the chances were better for me and my business and I could use my social capital to get over the initial uncertain period. Instead of concentrating on holding it all together, I could spend more time on keeping my eyes open to the opportunities that came along for me.

Now that I’m consulting again, I remember this lesson. I knew I wasn’t going to move to San Francisco and just hit ‘go’. I had to establish myself here, working with a startup who had was willing to take a risk on me and my ideas. Then I needed to PROVE myself, so I was transparent and documented everything openly and showed how things worked and didn’t all along. At the end of the day, I was able to achieve a more than reasonable success (that whole million photos uploaded on day 1 thing, then 10 million in 3 months), which people took note of. Part of the success I was able to achieve at Riya was also due to my involvement and contributions to the local community as well, which I made a priority. By the time I was ready to leave Riya, I had established enough ‘whuffie’ that starting Citizen Agency made sense. But it didn’t happen overnight and it certainly wasn’t easy.

We get loads of questions from people on how they can achieve overnight success (“You’ve come out of nowhere”). The truth is, the climb was fast, but there were a load of factors that were in place at the time I got here that are no longer present. Like early in the ‘Web 2.0′ craze and more accessibility to audiences (now that there are, what, like 100 million + blogs, the mountains of readers have turned into molehills). It takes a willing commitment and long term dedication to a very give and take relationship with the marketplace.

It’s very much like being a local merchant. You need to establish trust and reputation and build relationships with the people in your community. This doesn’t happen overnight.

Now, if we decided at this very moment that we want to, all of a sudden, move into entertainment marketing or communities, we would probably fail miserably. Why? Well, it isn’t that we couldn’t actually apply some great lessons that we have learnt from this industry into that one, it’s that we have no reputation in that one, so, even if we did get our foot in the door, following our ideas would probably be too risky for someone anyway. We know we still have so much to learn and do in our own wee niche of web technology and startups.

Growth happens slowly and tangentially. Occasionally it will jump over to a totally different industry or locale, but it’s rare and you can usually trace it back to a very close human connection between the core/local market and that one. If you want to seed growth, it is better to look to the edges of the market you are already seeing success in. AND an even SMARTER move is to give the current market the chance to grow to the edges organically. This will be your strongest indicator of a successful expansion. When it happens, garden it and foster it along. If it hasn’t moved along yet, you may still have loads of work to do on your core market. You have to continue to fertilize the roots. Without your roots, you fragment the edge markets and risk losing your strongest reputation market (or alienating it, which will find its way through the branches).

So, if you HAVE to grow (and ask yourself if you are ready for that yet, ’cause growing for the sake of growing is not a strategically smart move), grow smart. Grow to the edges.

For most of you who have been part of any communities, online and offline, you recognize that the above diagram as being a pretty rough estimation of the ‘levels’ of intimacy people who touch a community site/product on any level have. Of course, there are all sorts of gradations in between and people tend to oscillate between these levels, but here it is. One of the things that drives me nutty about the current use of the word, ‘community’ is that it has started to stand in for every hit one has to their site. As you see on the diagram, the casual visitors are not the ones invested in it.

So why are so many sites who purport to be striving for community implementing quantity-enhancing features like anonymous commenting? Now, I understand the need for Onramps, but Onramps and barriers to entry are not the same thing. Onramps/offramps are the ways that you assist your customer/contributors with ways to create content and then share content. It’s basically a data booster.

Barriers to entry, like site sign-up, for instance, aren’t always necessary. Google doesn’t make you sign up to search. But they do make you sign up to use anything else. Yahoo! doesn’t make you sign up to search or browse, either, but I don’t know any other Yahoo! properties that will allow you to post your own content without having that Yahoo!ID. There are definite benefits and drawbacks to this, of course. The drawbacks are that, if you don’t have an account, you have to go through the process of setting one up. Before you are ready to ‘commit’ yourself somewhere, you may not want to do that. The benefits, though, are numerous for both the company and yourself.

I know having Google p0wn me, I get a great deal in return. I get better search results. I get to unite my gApps to interoperate beautifully. Sure, they use my patterns to try and sell me stuff, but the more I use it, the more relevant those ads become. And I usually ignore them anyway. Don’t get me wrong. I am a bit concerned about the amount of data Google has on me, but my choice is clear…I can avoid them. Yahoo!, too. They own the social part of me and for that, I get a history of my social interaction. If I was a developer, I could take the data APIs and create cool maps of my interactions.

But these barriers also help me feel a little safer from stuff like SPAM (which I hate). The more complex the sign up, the safer I feel. I know when I stumble around Facebook, I’ll find 99% people because of their barriers to entry. And because they add other barriers (co-friending, etc), it feels like a closer knit community.

I don’t know if there has been a study done, but I’d expect that the closer knit communities have higher barriers to entry. I had to have a phone conversation to get on The Well! It made it feel way more substantial.

Of course, there is a happy medium. You don’t want to make people jump through so many hoops that they give up, either, but the trend towards sites that you never have to sign up to participate in the community in just feel…well…like they are striving for maximum quantity over actual quality.

Tell me, if someone isn’t willing to sign up to a simple webform to participate in a discussion, are they really your audience? And, as casual passers by, why would you design features that reward them and not your passionate team members who are contributing heavily?

Maybe I’m totally wrong, but whenever I go to a site that tells me I don’t have to sign up to comment, edit, create something, etc., it feels impersonal to me. It reminds me of the old media model where you broadcast to many to catch a few (vs. new media where you help create amazing experiences for a few who go out and tell many):

Personally, I feel that it just sets the wrong sentiment from the beginning. If you truly want to create a long term, sustainable community, you have to realize that this takes time and patience and effort with everyone who does sign up.

And, from Citizen Agency ‘wisdom’ it breaks one of the core rules of community fostering: it puts quantity ahead of quality.

Every now and then, I get the kind of questions that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. These questions are worse for women than any kind of overt sexism. Worse than saying, “girls aren’t good at math”. Worse than saying, “I don’t care about your coding skillz, yer hot.” The question is:

“Aren’t you afraid, as a woman, about being so open online?”

One of my favorite kickass chick songs ever was No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl”. Gwen Stefani’s lyrics totally resonated with me:

Oh…I’ve had it up to here!
The moment that I step outside
So many reasons
For me to run and hide
I can’t do the little things I hold so dear
‘Cause it’s all those little things
That I fear

I can’t remember when it was that I really noticed that, as a female, I was being sheltered and shaded for reasons I couldn’t comprehend. My brother, who was smaller than me was encouraged to take risks. To climb higher. To take bus rides alone. He was brave and growing up. Even cute sometimes. Me? I was being unladylike or exposing myself to danger. I was no tomboy, far from it. There I was, in my pink, frilly party dress climbing the tree and taking candy from strangers. When I got older, being a girl meant that I was at risk of being assaulted, yet boys in my grade could stay out all night. On those delicious occasions I was able to sneak out, the ones I viewed being hurt where the guys, who, after a few too many brewskies, got in a fight or worse, got behind the wheel.

In university, there were posters for self-defense classes for women all around. There were stories of women being followed, stalked, assaulted and raped. A girl had to watch herself. “Don’t walk on campus after dark without someone around.” Me? I was defiant. I don’t know why. I would drink down half of a pitcher of beer, then walk crookedly, happily across the dark campus, through the dark neighbourhood all the way home. I remember people freaking out at me, “Are you trying to get killed?” I don’t think I was. I guess I just wanted to continue to feel invincible. I looked around me at all of the boys who acted like they were invincible and I wanted to feel the same power.

And I wasn’t a stranger to being hurt. The two times I had been in a scary situation, though, were with people I knew and trusted. Somehow, I felt that being in public was making me safer. I wasn’t alone. In second year Women’s Studies class, I found out some statistics that backed up my suspicions. I can’t find the information now (it’s buried under pages and pages of FUD, unfortunately), but my professor told me that men are more likely to be assaulted in public (by a stranger) and women are more likely to be attacked in private (by someone she knows).

Fast forward to living my crazy life online. I guess I have never questioned my safety, but I get reminded of it constantly. At any given time, you can pretty much tell where I am, what I’m doing, who I’m with, what I’m feeling and where I’m going to next. People know what I’m thinking (whether they want to or not…lol). They pretty much know what I stand for. I fuck up. I celebrate. And I generally live every raw moment I feel comfortable with online…to nearly cringe-worthy levels.

And, I suppose that this makes me a really easy target for all sorts of nefarious activity, but no more than the men who work in the industry. In fact, and as many of them have reported, the guys tend to get as many, if not more death, violence and sexual mutilation threats as the women do. Robert Scoble once told me that it is pretty constant. Yet, when Kathy was threatened, it hit the national news. The reason it went that far is that every person and their dog decided to ‘come to the rescue’ for Kathy. Somehow she needed saving or protecting. Someone prominent even called me in the middle of this and said something to the tune of, “She is fragile and we have to protect her.”

I’m certainly not saying to belittle the real fear that Kathy was feeling. She is a wonderful person and she didn’t do anything to deserve anything awful that was said about her. ::Personally, I think that Kathy’s initial post was a very defiant act where she said, “I’m not standing for this anymore”. It is the storm that ensued after that where the fear was created.:: It was the hyperbolization of her incident was damaging to the future of women in technology. ::The CNN portrayal of Kathy as a ‘cute kitten’ and the lengthy camera shots that portrayed her as looking frail became lasting beacons for helplessness.:: ::Somehow, this incident has become the flagship for a culture of fear for women online.::

[::amended for clarity::]

I’ve received endless emails from women who mention the incident, telling me that they are ‘more careful’ of how much they participate in online discussions. They blog less. They make their twitter’s private, their flickr photos ‘friends only’ and they limit their openness in the variety of social networks out there.

And then we wonder where the women are?

Man, it sounds as if they are cowering in the shadows of the most empowering medium I’ve ever encountered! But where do you think those “invincible young guys” get all of their attention? Cowering? Hiding? No. Blogging. Forums. Being open. Out there. In their posted work on the social networks.

I received this email from a woman trying to break into technology recently:

“How does a woman become more public personally and professionally while also protecting her privacy and safety online? … As a web & graphic designer, it’s essential that I become more visible online and in the web industry. It seems natural and easy for my male counterparts to network with each other online and I want to be part of this day-to-day community…There are risks that women are more likely to face anywhere in life. Was using your real name a conscious choice for you? How did you reach that decision? How do you feel about it now? … ”

I read this and my heart sank. She also cited Kathy’s incident as an example of how she has been ‘warned’.

My theory? The precise reason that people bully others is to shut them up. 9 times out of 10, they don’t want to harm them physically, they want to silence them. However, this tactic doesn’t seem to work too well on men. I don’t know what Scoble, Pirillo and Arrington use as coping methods, but the continue to blog and live pretty open lives online. And I’m SURE it effects them. Unfortunately, we have some pretty high profile incidents where women have stopped blogging because of the same bullying. And, even worse, it resonates beyond the women who shut down. I’ve heard “Ever since the Kathy Sierra incident, I’ve ” too many times to feel comfortable.

Are women more at risk than men? Really? Are there statistics that show a significantly higher amount of physical harm coming to a woman who has put herself ‘out there’ than for a man? Or is it just empty threats? And the empty threats? Are they more frequent for women? Significantly? Really? I’ve heard the statistics that there are actually MORE women online. That there are actually MORE women blogging. Not significantly more. Like 52% or something. But nobody has come forward to show me where it is unsafe for a woman to expose her life to a wide audience. I’ve only experienced personal and professional gain, so I’m going off of experience, not heresay.

The ACTUAL danger here is not the danger, itself, but the danger of silencing the myriad of voices through the threat of danger. And you know, I’m going to be the ballsy (dangerous) broad I am and continue to challenge every single person who even hints towards the theory that women are less safe than men online. Because, truly, I would rather die for my convictions than live in fear any day.

I usually don’t post contest stuff…nor do I just post ’cause someone is a client (and Scrapblog is a client), but I really really heart their contest to send someone to the BlogHer 07 Conference in Chicago.

BlogHer is one of those conferences I’ve always wanted to go to, but found myself either away or broke at the time (last year, we were just setting up the company and had to pinch every penny, plus I was constantly in meetings trying to round up enough client work to get this thing of the ground). I heart the founders, Elisa, Lisa and Jory, and they have all been amazing mentors for me. I think the fit is so perfect for Scrapblog as there are oodles of talented bloggers and artists in that community.

This year, I’m already going (and totally excited for it)…good thing, ’cause I suck at making nice Scrapblogs (I don’t know why, all of my attempts look like muck).

You can find out more information on how to enter here. I really hope to see you at BlogHer 07!