Thanks to our friend Leslie in San Francisco for sending this reportage on BlogHer.

At the convention, brand-name companies lined up to greet their potential
business partners. The lunch break was sponsored by Weight Watchers.
Funding for the keynote seminar was provided by Johnson & Johnson, which
also used the event to launch momver sations.com, an upcoming “virtual
park bench” for motherly blogs. And the sex talk forum was sponsored by
Elexa, Trojan’s line of “sexual well-being products created from a woman’s
perspective.”
In the past, companies that dared place their brand on a writer’s site
typically picked an A-list blogger such as Daily Kos, and risked the
wisecracks in return for the high volume of page views.
But now, through niche ad networks like BlogHer, a company can purchase a
“parenting bundle” and get placement on three dozen blogs written by
mothers.
Dmitriy Kruglyak, a 28-year-old “health care blogger” and entrepreneur,
visited the convention to learn how to duplicate the model of bridging
advertising to blogging.
“If their niche is women bloggers, then mine is health care bloggers,”
Kruglyak said. “What they’re building for women, and selling to
advertisers, is what I want to build for doctors and nurses, and so on,
who blog.”

Here’s a cool niche, daddy coyote blogging!

Many, many people have emailed and posted regarding their regrets at not having been able to memorialize MEG on Friday. It was a small gathering, five people, two of whom didn’t really know her but who were paying their respects none-the-less. Here’s what I think… Michelle believed in love and so many of us loved, respected and admired her. When you lose someone you love, you accept it and move on. Time heals.

We’re moving on through our sadness, but I wanted to simply steal this post from Mike Golby as a last tribute to my departed friend. Golby always finds the core of the matter:

:: Saturday, July 29, 2024 ::

Seasons in the Sun…

Adieu l’Émile je t’aimais bien | Adieu l’Émile je t’aimais bien tu sais | On a chanté les mêmes vins | On a chanté les mêmes filles | On a chanté les mêmes chagrins | Adieu l’Émile je vais mourir | C’est dur de mourir au printemps tu sais | Mais je pars aux fleurs la paix dans l’âme | Car vu que tu es bon comme du pain blanc | Je sais que tu prendras soin de ma femme | Je veux qu’on rie | Je veux qu’on danse | Je veux qu’on s’amuse comme des fous | Je veux qu’on rie | Je veux qu’on danse | Quand c’est qu’on me mettra dans le trou

Lately, Meg’s been on my mind; more especially, yesterday and today. Unable to attend a memorial gathering for her at BlogHer, I carried my thoughts of her through the day.

Wendy and I found ourselves scrambling up rocky paths, into forgotten caves, and along narrow ledges under soaring slabs of prehistoric stone. We were geocaching; hunting — I guess, much like John Laroche in The Orchid Thief — an elusive treasure. Laroche sought the Ghost Orchid, and his story — enjoyed by Meg, was elevated to art by Marion Orlean, Charlie Kauffman, Chris Cooper, and Meryl Streep.

I was also seeking solace. Unable to attend the memorial — time zones and my having screwed my chances of ever finding my MSN Passport address or password precluded me joining the online link up early this morning — I spent the day reflecting on the life of a friend now gone. I’m not good at endings, so even Frank’s posts on the memorial cut me up a bit, despite his being a saint for doing so much to realize the event.

I’ve nothing but good memories of meg. Her courage, love, and loyalty transcended in-the-world mundanities and, although she did not blog per se, she was unable to restrain herself in mails and, occasionally, her comments feature, where she’d let rip with a love of the great wide open. So I’ve been missing her.

I’m no great believer in synchronicity (or anything for that matter), but finding my first halfway decent calla lily of winter outside a virtually inaccessible cave on the side of the mountain set it all to rest for me. If I needed a signal, a ghost orchid, an answer to any prayer, that lily you see above is it. (Originally a South African flower, the calla or arum lily does well in California and — to me — became virtually synonymous with meg’s graphic coding exercises.)

Our walk, enhanced by my finding my lily at the mouth of the cave (the unknown, it seemed to lead into the heart of the mountain), enabled me to come to terms with a pretty hard and blunt truth; i.e. for better or worse (and I’m thinking of her here), meg is gone.

And although she found it so difficult to accept or call on, meg left behind an abundance of love, perhaps the greatest gift any of us can give to other people. Claude’s farewell mail reminded me of Brel. Translated by Rod Mckuen to Seasons in the Sun and made a hit by Terry Jacks, the English version — while acknowledging it — did not carry Jacques Brel’s depth and down-home earthiness.

So it’s Brel I hear when I say “Goodbye Michelle, it’s hard…”

Adieu ma femme je t’aimais bien | Adieu ma femme je t’aimais bien tu sais | Mais je prends le train pour le Bon Dieu | Je prends le train qui est avant le tien | Mais on prend tous le train qu’on peut | Adieu ma femme je vais mourir | C’est dur de mourir au printemps tu sais | Mais je pars aux fleurs les yeux fermés ma femme | Car vu que je les ai fermés souvent | Je sais que tu prendras soin de mon âme | Je veux qu’on rie | Je veux qu’on danse | Je veux qu’on s’amuse comme des fous | Je veux qu’on rie | Je veux qu’on danse | Quand c’est qu’on me mettra dans le trou

Jacques Brel | Le Moribond

:: Mike Golby 11:56 PM [+]

I turned in the POS General Motors rental at 5:30 this morning, a 2024 Pontiac GT with about 25,000 miles, a few more miles on it than my Toyota Matrix, and though a little beefier in the acceleration department, a rattletrap vehicle nonetheless. We put 1115 miles on it since last Sunday. I drove 1093, Beth drove 22. Beth’s share was a stretch between Eugene and Grants Pass that is pretty much the most difficult section of Interstate Highway 5, so it’s more equal than it sounds at first blush. What I liked worst about the General Motors “Pontoon crap turismo:” the fact that I had to beat on the dashboard to get it to stop vibrating. What I liked second worst: the way it drank gasoline like Bukowski on a bender. What I liked best. Nothing really… the trunk light is a joke, you can’t see the interior of the trunk but you can see the lid. How stupid is that? The automatic door locking mechanism was iffy. It didn’t always work. The car has a big plastic beak sticking out in front that gets abraded by the curb whenever you park, and scuffed by every driveway you enter. The power seat adjustment was okay, and the dashboard instrumentation appeals to the inner geek. Did I mention that I used about one gallon to the mile with this pig? My experience: Pontiac GT = sux. Toyota Matrix = okay. Pontiac makes a car called the Vibe. It’s essentially a Matrix. Based on my experience in that pig GT, I’d expect the Vibe to have special Detroit rattletrap reverse engineering built-in as part of an evil GM feature set.

The women of BlogHer were treated to some GM sponsored sporty car demos at the Hyatt San Jose Mediterranean Center this weekend, while my rental was wheezing and gasping in the parking lot behind the hotel. At the height of the crisis of Peak Oil, General Motors was selling the women of BlogHer on the Escalade, a 13 mpg porker that even the plutocrats in the Bush family can’t afford to drive anymore unless they can dominate Iraqi and Persian oil production.

I hope that the revenue from the GM BlogHer platinum sponsorship was used to get a lot of women to the gathering who otherwise couldn’t have afforded to come, was used to offset expenses so the event was affordable for most of us. I hate the idea that the sponsorship may have been used to offset honoraria and expenses to stars like Arianna Huffington, much as I appreciated her appearance with Grace Davis, Mena Trott, and Caroline Little on the day two keynote panel that Chris Nolan moderated. I hate the idea that all the “community, sharing, mutualness and interdependence” that Liz Henry talks about requires a big corporate financial subsidy.