This post is sponsored by Disney Story. To find out more about this brand-new story-creation app – and how it puts the power of storytelling in your hands – click here.
Last weekend, I had the chance to attend and speak at the Mom 2.0 Summit. It’s my favorite conference of the year, and this year it was here in Orange County. The fact that I only had to drive 30 minutes to get there and didn’t have to negotiate travel-sized toiletries made me even more excited. Just prior to the conference the Wall Street Journal did a piece on Mom 2, and other blogging conference, in which they characterized conferences like this as a shallow excuse for moms to get out of the house and away from their kids while partying for several days. It was incredibly condescending and dismissive – purporting that we spend our days eating snacks, drinking on the floor out of the minibar, and posting selfies. Now, I will be the first to admit that we do some of those things at conferences, it’s also ludicrous to imply that this is ALL that goes on. The connections I’ve been able to make through blogging conferences have pushed this little blogging hobby into a full-time job. In addition, most of us working in the blogging space do our jobs in isolation. We don’t have a water cooler or a break room where we can chat with co-workers. So getting together a couple times a year to “talk shop” is hugely beneficial. I think my friend Andy Hinds said it best in his write-up in the New York Times:
I was a little surprised to find that most [Mom 2.0 attendees] didn’t see The Journal’s article as a simple case of institutionalized sexism, but rather a function of traditional media’s anxiety about independent online media. After all, as one of the speakers had pointed out during a panel that day, when you searched “WSJ Mommy Bloggers” on the day the original article appeared, the offending piece came up fourth — behind three blog posts eviscerating it.
Anyways, we had a blast poking fun at the WSJ article during the conference. Here are some photos from the weekend:
This post is sponsored by Disney Story. To find out more about this new story-creation app – and how it puts the power of storytelling in your hands – click here. You can download the Disney Story app from iTunes – for FREE – right here. You can also check out Disney Story on Twitter and on Facebook.
