Global chatroom for BlogHer: 7.30.05, 2 pm - 2 am GMT

Why you don't have to be at BlogHer to be heard...

One gift of organizing BlogHer has been emails from women and men all over the world who are interested in joining the dialogue. Another has been emails of encouragement from a handful of women like Laura Scott. She never asked for anything, just kept urging us to make it happen.

When I saw with a shock the size of BlogHer's waitlist and continued to hear of global interest in these sessions, I asked Laura's advice on chat. Predictably, she's making it happen.

Laura and her business partner, Katherine Lawrence, have pulled together a day-long, password-protected chatroom for BlogHer. We considered going prehistoric uber-geek with IRC, but were worried about (a) trolls and (b) how to help a range of users from geek to newbie find the right client, especially folks on MACs. Instead, she chose a Flash7 interface (with good penetration worldwide) that'll allow her and Katherine to ban trolls. Laura's donating the whole thing through her company, pingVision.

Here's how to join in on July 30:

• Go to Laura's blog or go to the pingVision homepage
• Click on the ad for the BlogHer Global chatroom (it'll look something like the image above)
• Register (it's an easy onepager - you need to enter your name, email, password and check the box agreeing to follow the community rules) so that Laura can ban any trolls.

Would you like to help? Laura's looking for a few good chatters. If you're at BlogHer and would like to act as a chat correspondent from sessions, or if you're following our live bloggers (listed in the schedule) and can report updates, by all means, comment below or on her blog. Thanks.

Comments

[Alison]

Well this is great news. Thanks to Laura for stepping up and also to Lisa, Elisa and the others for making this conference happen :)

[Lisa Stone]

Absolutely!

[Nicole Simon]

I am sorry to hear you go for a flash interface only.

Fact is:
IRC can be accessed by many clients without a problem and has proven to be an overall workable system.

Flashinterfaces on the other hand are usually a usability nightmare for experienced users.

With IRC clients, I do have an out of the box log in my defined format. I will not have anything similar in that flash chat.

Standard moderation services of channels like invite, moderation, etc are well known for over a decade.

IRC clients can be set up to be downloadable PRESET with chosen channels and installations so newbies just would have had to install something and would be _in_ immediatly.

There are existing Java-Gateways from the browser side.

As you go through a registering process anyway, it would have been absolutly easy to go with servers like freenode, make registering and enable exactly those users.

*sigh*

[Ruby Sinreich]

Ditto Nicole! I'll try to participate anyway, but I see this Flash business as an extra hurdle. :(

[Laura Scott]

Nicole and Ruby, I understand your concerns. The problems with IRC, though, make it a not-ideal choice -- unless we want only the more tech-savvy computer geeks to participate.

Our main concern regarding IRC is security, where people are able to not only see IP addresses but ISP account names. This was one concern that we felt was important to consider, given that this is a women's conference that stands some chance of attracting some untoward attention. And based on my experiences from PC days, there's always a LOT of setup involved with IRC clients. Often people have to find alternative ports just to connect. Programmers and developers and internet old-timers consider IRC a legacy protocol that's convenient and familiar. But most people online these days would not even know what IRC is.

Java chat is a problematic solution because it does not run on many browsers (such as my Firefox for Mac), and cgi chat we consider a security issue because it's always on. The other semi-viable approach would be using a chatroom with javascript refresh. But that can make you dizzy after a few minutes of 10-second refresh. And with more than a few people, it's very easy to get lost fast.

Yes, it would be great if everyone had good, stable IRC clients installed, knew how to use them, and knew how to protect themselves and their personally identifiable information. But we felt it was fair to assume that most people interested interested in Blogher are not computer geekettes and have no IRC experience.

Maybe we're wrong, but our guess was (and is) that most of the women and men wanting to connect about Blogher specifically would not be interested in researching, finding, installing, configuring and learning how to use new software just to participate in an online chat. (Personally I have not yet found an IRC client that works well on Mac without freezing or crashing outright.) For most participants, we guessed that their "chat" experiences were more of the YahooIM variety. In this regard, we hope that this Flash chat solution works out.

With more than a few days' notice next year -- and I'm assuming there will be a next year -- we'll be able to offer something much more elegant and versatile. As it is, we are doing our best filling in how we can with limited time and resources.

[Lisa Stone]

>With more than a few days' notice next year -- and I'm assuming there will be a next year

Yes on both counts!

[Elisa Camahort]

FYI: More than 50% of our attendees have never attended a blogging conference before (although they have likely attended other kinds.)

Point being: the audience for BlogHer reaches out to many different kinds of online users, and being online doesn't necessarily equate being highly technical anymore with the easy tools that have been introduced in the last couple of years.

I hope this explains BlogHer's thinking when adding this feature on somewhat (ok, make that very) last minute notice.

[Ruby Sinreich]

I'm trying to get into the chat. I registered, but now when I log in I see a message that says "Logging now" and then nothing happens.

Do I need to do something else?

[Ruby Sinreich]

I figured it out...

"Nevermind." -Emily Litella