 Our guest speaker tonight is Lisa Stone, who's the founder of Blogger. An interesting thing about Blogger is when it first came along, I had a really good thinking. Why do we need this? I mean, it's not huge, so it showed how wrong that was about that, along with many other things. Quite a successful enterprise. And Lisa has quite a long history that she'll put to use here. I don't want to say too much, but it is important. So, I'm without, if I missed anything, anybody? I take it explicitly, but I've taken a weird step tonight. I'm writing down a few things that I wanted to make sure I got across. The first thing I should do is congratulate the work of the center on your 10th anniversary. It is an honor to be able to speak and be invited to speak on this occasion. Because of the work the center has done is to extend participatory meeting and to have a user. Thank you for what you do. Those of you who are involved. When Amra asked me how I wanted to approach this anniversary topic, which is your internet, I suggested sharing some learning from the community. I accidentally started with two other bloggers about how presidential candidates and consumer brands are helping and hurting themselves with women online. In 2005, my co-founders, at least at Camel Horde, during ZHR Dan and I came together to have a grassroots meetup called Love Her. In response to a question that needed to die, where are the women's bloggers? Three years later, nobody asks that question anymore. Women who love our ubiquitous, and Blubber itself, is now a company that reaches more than 8 million unique people online via our publishing network of 114,000 new blogs. And our national conferences will base this year on one of these blogs. One of these blogs in our network is blogger.com. This is a community journalism site with 60 editors and more than 23,000 members blogging on what's hot, good, and good news social media. Today, Blubber really provides a pharmacy to what I can only term revolutionary change. Specifically, how participatory media are activating and changing the most powerful consumers in the world, American women. I'm sure many of you here today know the statistics, so I'm only going to briefly read you out. American women control 83% of household spending, including cars and electronics. That's about $5 trillion a year. You can only expect that first to get bigger, since women say what women do, and get higher rates in return on our investments for a little more conservative. We also represent the majority of people graduating with professional degrees and nearly all disciplines, unfortunately, engineering is not among us. But because women represent 50% or so, if you want to sum up so, of the population, we're also the majority of users online. Since about 2006, women also have been just as likely as men to read and write blogs. Blogs. Women's blogs are a huge turning point for the future of the internet. Once a woman has a blog, she's just as low as a weight using any number of social media technologies, typically Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, not in that order if you're not 40-something like Diane. Women who blog are seven times more likely to use social networks to reach out to friends and four times more likely to text message than other women online. Women who blog are 30% more likely to buy online and we spend more when we do. Even our shopping and social household, 56% of women we surveyed recently and surveyed about 3,000 say that they have purchased a product for recommendation of the blogger. 62% say they have recommended a product to service from their blogs. But you don't have to just take our word for it. Take Nielsen's. Nielsen had ratings officially attributed to 10% drop in morning show viewership alone to women choosing instead to read and comment on parody blogs. Here's my point about the future of the internet. What women say online is evolving both because of the new social technologies at our disposal and because of the validation and confirmation that women are receiving from other women using social media. With social media, we're no longer restricted to stealing minutes away from our jobs or our families or our communities or our attempted fitness routine in order to call and read us friends and tell them our opinions. Instead of social media, we act. We tell the world a few keystrokes on our blogs and social networks and lo and behold, the world acts back. The very same world in which women have never achieved parody on op-ed pages or in public office. So what does public reinforcement get? More action. This is the opportunity in front of us of women online today. I say act, not write, deliberately. Today women are using blogs and social sites in a way that extends far beyond the blog as personal printing press metaphor, which as a journalist is the reason I first became so excited about it. I'm talking about behavioral evolution, which can be good and bad if you're trying to get the support of these women. If you strike the right nerve, you'll be rewarded as Doug's real beauty campaign was when they launched the Time Relaxed video on YouTube showing a normal woman being warped into an unattainable supermodel via Photoshop. More magazines and kudos when Jamie Lee Curtis screwed down to her skitties left off the makeup and was photographed as a pretty real normal looking 40-something woman. Brani, Peter Talbot, built a hilarious site around a fictitious male hero who instantly stalls a woman's product just like Brani's product and earned hearts and flowers from many women who sent it to my inbox. Although I don't think any of them have yet to find a construction worker who builds her in our marina day to make sure that she has a good evening. And this action women are blogging is certainly not just commercial. The philanthropy and political action are the name of the game for women online this year more than ever. I realize many people, many women in this room in fact are involved with pioneering efforts such as Global Voices Online and the Sunlight Foundation. But what I'm talking about is bloggers doing what their consumer marketing experts or local campaign managers might consider a different field. I'm talking about food bloggers, like by a blog called Shae Kim who for the past three years have been raising thousands of dollars for children internationally by wrapping up their expertise via an initiative called Waiting for Help. I'm also talking about things like momcrafts.com which is a site which was originally founded by John Edwards supporters who, when we left the race, had grown to develop a group discussion by Democrats and Republicans who are blogging the election and talking policy. Also, through blogger and many other sites, many women had the best time this year to blog and tell their senators about Senate Bill 529, the Mother's Act. This is ground-breaking legislation aimed at researching the causes of postpartum depression and making sure that resources exist to help educating mothers and their families about the risk of very deadly disease. Now, when we're blogging this initiative, we know the names of its backwards senators and end-beds in German and I assure you we won't forget them. These are wins in the blog for a sphere. And just in a few examples of how if you strike right at home, women who blog will reward you, your tissue, your candidate, your product. If, however, you miscommunicate with women in this medium, you can't do damage to your brand whether you're running for president or trying to sell coffee. Before we open up the discussion, question, and debate, I'd like to give you two examples from the past year of how brands hurt themselves by having to understand where women are going, both online and online. One of my favorite, least favorite examples, is the response of the blogger community to the news that presidential candidates have continually declined to answer 12 policy questions developed by our committee. These are questions on four major areas, healthcare, the economy, and the environment. Last July, 800 women got together in Chicago. And I'm going to say for our annual conference, 200 of us got in a room and hammered out 12 questions that fit into these four categories based on a pre-converting on hundreds of women. And we decided to reach out to every campaign with an offer to do an on-camera video blog interview between a candidate and a blogger from their party. Since July, no one has accepted. Instead, we received two offers to feature candidates' spouses, both wives, no first husbands. The Barack Obama campaign began a grassroots outreach effort of their own called Women for Obama, and we're in a jaded, discussing policy and getting a vote out. The Hillary Clinton campaign also launched a new side of its own called Moms for Hillary. On this side, the Clinton campaign offered that opportunity to win a mom's night out with two former social secretaries of Hillary's who would talk about the candidate's special family traditions and provide campaign joy. Candidate Clinton's healthcare plan was the only public policy linked to this site or from the site in December when we did the survey. And then the site has since added education and economy. So in December, I decided, who am I to turn down an interview with a potential first lady without permission from the community? So we asked the blogger's community about whether or not they wanted to continue trying to talk to the candidates, or whether or not speaking with their families in support of the equity, or did they want to vote? We also asked women for these care communities in the websites. And the response of the community was pretty overwhelming. All site comments and also private emails. Nearly 65% of respondents said that they wanted the blogger to speak only to the candidates. 29% were eager to have his interview vote. And 2.6% said thousands of supporters were added. As for Moms for Hillary website and to a lesser degree women for Obama, 82% were either turned off by these efforts or had a recommendation to change their approach. 18.4% liked these sites. Our survey comments we received are as diverse as the women who make up the majority of internet users and American voters. Across the board, bloggers into the survey, and again, bloggers, a nonpartisan organization that has a well-linked on-the-partisan group of women, honest, and it can be $8 million we reach every month. But they asked candidates in campaigns to do three things. To take women online quote unquote seriously, to stop quote unquote patronizing women online, and for quote unquote pandering women voters. Here are a couple of representative quotes, and by representative I mean that they represent 20 or more of the comments that we received. And one, quote, if you want to reach women, particularly Moms, you have to come to them and spend some time online. By doing it your way, i.e. on your own websites, you're doing your campaign to disservice. You show that you're on touch with women on our and what they care about. Here's another quote. I want to know where you as candidate for president stand. Not where you think I want you to stand, but exactly what your opinions are on Iraqi economy, education, and health care. And here are a roundup about this, particularly the Moms for Holy site. Not all women or mothers are marrying below. Next quote. Find ideas for education. Do Moms require exclamation points? Because I sort of thought we were interested in family-family social policy worth by exciting exclamation point nights, exclamation point out, exclamation point friends, exclamation point, and a quote. What's so ironic about this example to me is that ever since Senators Clinton and Obama announced the same week in January 2007, they were running for office, I have seen more excitement and interest in a presidential campaign on loves by women that have nothing to do with public policy. Loves on which I have never even seen current events even discussed. I'm talking about crack blocks, food blocks, and some of the parenting blocks that don't go there, and my space blocks that are just very personal what I did today. These are women outside of political lobbying at her chamber. They are becoming engaged and excited about the selection when they are able to have a conversation about it with the people they care about, not just receiving and encouraging hate messaging about it. What's more, giving the opportunity to engage in civil disagreement and fierce debate about even the most heated topics. We have found that women will do so if the right environment is created. So in the past year, what her has come up with a couple of experiments helping our community agree to this grade and find common ground. We've put up columns such as Why I am pro-life? Why I am pro-choice? Right next to each other and had people mix it up. We dug way in and reality stem cell research when I was a politician in Missouri. We also have taken on the marriage. We've also taken on race versus gender in the campaign. We have the candidates who are engaged with an archetype of these voters and in a scenario where they carefully control the terms and the environment. I have some recommendations about this. But first, I want to give you another example. This one is doubtless much better known as if we give the environment repeating something that some of you know. But I'm talking about the breastfeeding wars that have termed as Delta and Green Maryland, Starbucks, and ultimately Facebook with women who love them. In each of these cases, the businesses at hand made a decision to ask breastfeeding women to leave their establishments resulting in blocks, urns, boycotts, and a very great face for these brands. The most recent of these is Facebook. In September 2007, Facebook closed a women's account and posted a note and we covered it on blog.com. We don't always break news. We break news perspective every single day. But this was one where we had quite a story. The note rang. Hi Karen. After viewing the situation, we determined we violated our terms of use. Please note, community drug use or other obscene content is not allowed on the website. Additionally, we do not allow users to send threatening obscene and harassing messages. Unsolicited messages will also not be tolerated. We will not be able to reactivate their account for any reason. This decision is filed. Thanks for understanding and the customer support representative, Facebook. Karen's recipe and photographs were not on her note page but her Facebook page. They were behind the link that said recipe and photos. It did not go unnoticed by the moms on Facebook that fraternity parties were being held to a different standard. The hypocrisy identified the blog storm in the suit. Today, the Facebook group pays Facebook but the recipe is not a scene. It has 38,000 850,300 that's today's count. And the blog Facebook sucks started by the legaleturnaljustice.com still exists. That's not just a blown commercial opportunity. Facebook inactivately conceives its own ex-customer, Fenda. What a sheen. As soon as Facebook opened up to those of us outside of college years, women who blog were all over it. These are women who were looking for a ladder to your book. They were looking for a virtual ladies room wall in which to write each other as well as on our blogs, especially women helped us reach out to our male readers, to the men in our lives and to our colleagues at work. We're talking about, particularly in the case of women who blog, a constituency for whom the internet is a lifeline. We expect it to have to silence our own voices in order to give a total right of theirs. The blogging sphere set us free. To be rejected for one among many women is considered a massive accomplishment. To be told that what you're doing is obscene after nine months of heart-baking, finally getting your little baby stop screaming and eating after you've invested what little spare time you have in a community to set up a profile while selectively ignoring what your mind cares. So there are a few lessons I take for this and I'm really lucky to hear your thoughts when I'm done. First, I think that we should pause with like ten years ago that we're considered to exist. And it's to ask full opinion I heard when I left CNN to the shore could stop the web TV that women would never go online. So it's really nice to have that face out of the way for women. Now I think we should look at the numbers. Women's interest in behaviors do not fit into the screen in purple silence. The domestic diva, the soccer mom, the sex in the same single, these are all labels that I'm sure many have seen apply to women at one point or another and these are just not keeping up with the social media time. Women today are as interested in discussing our choice of candidate and discussing which blogging platform of life, our choice of dog food and what money market funds we're going to use to try to protect the kids' educations. The problem is not women online because we are perfectly comfortable with all our personalities and all of our lives. The problem is on to Bob and applying decades old angering behaviors and techniques for messaging and selling and mixing these archaic approaches with stereotypes of female interaction all of which falls flat when sprayed out via new technologies. The result leaves money, political change, brilliant thinkers and technological innovation on the table and I would argue that we can't afford to lose the support of these women. Let's change that and let's start by taking advice from a blog. So forget push media direct dial, precinct walking, home banking and now engaging Twitter messages from candidates. Instead, let's build on formal meetings and have true voter to voter candidates and cut out the middle man or woman I'd say as a former journalist now blogger and goes straight to the voter and anyone who wants to sell directly to the consumer. There are four main themes that emerge from our voter survey and I think they apply as well to consumer brands as they do to presidential candidates. Thing number one was reach out to established women's networks. Don't create annulments. Reach women where they're already don't really live the way. Please stop marketing to women and start talking with women. The methods that you have for doing this will change with the technology. When it starts on hiring women from the community and the marketing demographic and trying to reach there are incredible experts out there and they started right around the age of 11. Don't separate women out as moms or singles or worse a monolithic single block sex style parenting colleges live and work side by side in our brains and in our bullets please don't hard to type us unless you're going to work with us to come up with plans. Please work with us behind common ground or you will lose votes and dollars in today's world. The only thing hard to do in letters being a woman who hasn't seriously the biggest single issue I know with anyone who lives healthcare and on the hardest side of course you can see the blog we cover everything under the sun because women are blogging right after healthcare really truly comes the world the economy and the environment but this is a natural constituency for other issues that I know the working center cares about and it's one of the reasons I care for the working center because I've talked about I'm on my own I've worked for the working center so I I've worked for the working center because I I've worked for the working center it doesn't really come out I think the who doesn't know how to use a computer is grandma. Yeah, what's the problem with grandma? Well, throughout history, throughout literature, and through every culture that I've read into it all, for a man to be called the one that is the wife since all of it exists. So there's something that people in America, I'm sure, there are other people at this university who are there, well, I can't answer, but I will tell you, it certainly affects the online world. I don't think it helps us that for a long, long time into burying was the belly lick of the white male. I'm really happy that there are people in this room who have worked to change that. I think that moving forward, what we need to do is be really cognizant of the language that we use. What's ironic about what you just shared is that it's actually Japanese teens, teenage girls and their mothers who were on the floor kind of texting and have completely changed the way any of us use our old phones today because they were listened to, they were watched as a hot hot hot comes in the market and now we're all benefiting from it. And I'm very happy to report that grandma, AKA the Loomers, now represents the most important timing power in the world today. So anyone who wants to think about particularly the current software economy is going to have to listen to our grandma and show a little respect. So maybe what we should do is talk about some blogging initiatives around that and some ways I'm going to think back because I don't think there's anything whatsoever to be anti in each other. You know, at least I see the most office people that have never seen one. And you know, these people aren't. No, not at all. I think that, unfortunately, and I don't know if I made this point that well, as a result of the role that white men play in engineering, not the engineering software in the stereotype, which is completely unfair as well. It's a gross irony and we should fight it. I sort of wondered if maybe the thing to do is to consider looking at a way in which to write about this and have some fun with it. Because I began to believe that the only approach to effective resolution of things I've had is a comedy or a walkie-talkie. That's actually, as you and I discussed, how blogging got started. And so we decided it was at the time that Susan Estridge was blowing up Michael Kinsley for the LA Times update to complaining about how there weren't enough women writing off ads. And I looked hard at that and my first blog was when I covered Democratic National Convention for the LA Times. And I decided that instead of complaining about it, what we wanted to do was to show the world with metrics, with data, with big meetups on. And that has worked with a positive plan, I'm happy to say, that our first volunteer decided at that conference was a guy. And we still like to mentor a network, so that's me. I'd just like to point out that the lights are on. It would be really helpful for those of us in the back, if you're in the front, could use them so that we can hear what you're saying. Thank you. So thank you so much for the great talk. One thing I thought of in my generation in particular for women in the poor Asian politics and other issues is the notion of not necessarily being associated with a network that's identified as women, which is today, that you want to be a third of the plotter, not a female plotter, right? Or normally, I guess you can see, though, it's having an interest that our specials encounter or outside of the norm. I think we see that we have a lot to go around. The debates we've heard in our online news like this, it's real. I mean, it's definitely a challenging thing for people who are interested in issues related to gender but also don't want to be defined as part of that and also will be inclusive at the same time of their positions. How do you do that? How do you use those challenges to go for younger generations? I guess we're both helpful in terms of but also from the message and the message. Oh, I think that's a great question. So long for what's created and the way in which to create opportunities for people with new blocks to gain additional exposure, education, community, and now with our ad network, economic empowerment. Men are absolutely a part of our community. They are in our ad network. We have some of the best chefs I've ever read in our food network, we have parenting bloggers, we have entertainment bloggers, we're men. So it's very open on a wheel of the ball with our community on. I think that what's interesting is that to continue to ask our community what they want us to do with gender issues, one of the things that characterizes us right now is that our conference is still represented as an email-only speaking roster and that is at the request of our members. We ask them every year, would you like us to have men speaking in conference? Would you like us to have men speaking in conference? And every year they say no thanks. So we're trying to be representative in their responses typically. We absolutely want men in conference. We love them and read our blogs. We're so glad that you linked them in for blog work, that men are in the blog roles, that men are in the ad network. But there are so few places where women get to speak about technology and food or technology and parenting or technology and whatever that we really just want to keep it to women for right now. As such, what's interesting is that actually this summer's annual conference we are going to have a men of blog hermitage. We're gonna have a little get together just for men who come to the conference. And I anticipate that some day. But it's an interesting issue and I want to be back. What do you think we should do? I'm not sure. I mean, it's just a question that I would be absolutely like I said, and I think it's just the question around maybe a client has to go ahead with her as a woman to train her own interests. So it's just a lot of interesting questions. Well, you don't need such things. I think it's so important that you set the right term because I think I would not be comfortable with the tone that was explained in the area of anybody. And so this is not content for women. This is content by women about what's hot online and willing to know what's hot. So I think that's very good. And this starts being, who's been involved in a lot of people's dialogue and being able to work broadly about the idea of this, but to date, as well as pointing to your own candidate or a woman who she or she has had in the box It's been fascinating for me to watch how the community races stereotypes. So we have one, I'm gonna identify race and demographics just because they pertain to this conversation. We have one white female blogger, Aaron Duttepe-Vest, who went and interviewed Maxine Waters, who was a Black Congresswoman from Southern California. And Aaron is in a lot of support and a representative of Waters at the Dorsiflin. And we put a video blog up on the site and it was really fascinating. Aaron went on to ask Hillary Clinton, the police was on her campaign, which led to quite a number of comments. But what's interesting, I feel like I'm watching this community sort of breaks stereotypes all the time, which is valuable to me because I'm still not seeing, to your point, the other commenter, or at least William's point about number of times she hears terms like teenage girl or grandma, he's negatively on, you know, it's really nice to have that. Hi, Christine Gorman, my name is Bella. I was wondering if you could tell us a little more, you mentioned a few statistics at the top of your talk about ethnicity and international regions, if all in U.S. based, is it, you know, what a few things like that one. And then secondly, can you talk a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of the people who are cross posting within the law firm, I mean, how does that work? Is there some kind of a financial relationship that was happening? Absolutely. So, I don't have the time of racial demographic data on our user base right now, but I am happy to say that we are not an all-white site, either in the editors or in the members. Our overall demographic is such, we have a median age is 30, 67% of our members, and I'm sort of appreciative of crossing the entire blog for network, this is melblogs.com and also the 1400 blogs we work with as a publisher. On 7% of what we reach out between 25 and 54, we're very specifically for adult women because we don't want to get into the legal ones, so John Bowie to deal with when you work with minors, because we do have the Sex and Relationships channel, and so you can assume that the remaining 33% are over 54. 72% are married, 53% have children, I've shared some of the other statistics. On blog for.com specifically, we have 60 editors who cover 24 different views. These were on the old guidance of issues that when we asked our bloggers what they're blogging about, they say everything from business and technology, finance and career, to the media arts, to DIY. On 87% of the people who come to blog for.com are from the United States. 94% are from the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, we're a classic English language demographic. That said, we work very hard to begin to put figures out into the world community. We have a blogger, an Indian blogger, who's sent, who writes a great deal about Southeast Asian women. We have bloggers from Italy, from Africa, and we're eager to do more of that. I think that the most important thing that we're trying to do is to raise profile of members of the community in the issues that are rotating them. So the past year, as you've seen in the election, this was super hot. But in addition, the subject of body image has come up again and again and again and again. And so we actually decided to launch a body image channel and we started a group of blog letters to my body where we have had more than 200 women write different letters about other feelings about themselves. And this is just, initially, how I feel when I look in the mirror, right? It's spread out into women who have survived cancer, women who are blind, women who aren't at the portal. We have a big issue right now with the women of color. And so we're just trying to get a follow-up audience where they want us to go in a way. Now, the nuts and bolts, as she just mentioned, blogger is a durable site. We believe we'll start at the end of the source. We are really excited to be part of the group standing and we're all learning so fast as we can. For those of us who don't know, what's Drupal? Drupal is a content management system. It's open source. You can find it in Drupal.org. You will find that there are many other people in here who know a lot more about it than I do. Even then we have two sites in it. And they just had a huge confidence with it here in Boston. Yeah. And what's wonderful about it is it's a modular content management system, which means that the community creates and delivers different bells and whistles for a lot of better queries and you can plug it into your site and you don't have to create any use of yourself. It scales enormously, much bigger than Ruby on Rails or some of the other sites. And it can be made a little much prettier than our current site does, which I take all the blame for. Um, hi, as a... Now it's on. As a full-time journalist, I have found, and a semi-moder, I found this very interesting and enlightening. As a full-time journalist, I'm interested obviously in the business model of the news business. And I actually have two questions. One of them is, how many full-time paid staffers with benefits, i.e. health insurance, do you have? And the second question is more of the people that are blogging who blog for, do you have any data on what they are not doing? What have they eliminated from their life and learned how to have time to do the blogging? Sure, absolutely. And I will answer a question that was just raised also that I didn't get to. So on Gloucaraek.com, and a meaningful document, today, Gloucaraek.com is beginning to work here. We've incorporated it as a business. We have now 22 full-time employees with benefits. We have about 10, 15 other critical contractors that we work with on a part-time and as-y basis. We reach 8 million in the next month according to the Nielsen and Rady Sykes Census and deliver a little over 40 million We are a 100 million plus in compression a month network for those of you who work with advertising. You can see that we are charting as a top 10 with this network, with those numbers. We certainly don't pay our employees what we would like to. We are a pledging startup with a series of funding and we are extremely proud of what the Sincredible team has accomplished. When you go to the Blufford.com homepage, you see just the tip of the network because our 60 editors are paying $50 per post to blog between two and eight times a month depending upon their agreement with us. They keep all first rights to their work. We keep second rights because we don't want to be ripping it off the site. The editors posts are the first thing you see. We also invite every member of the network to blog on the network as long as they blog according to our community guidelines. We try to put comments on a par with what the editors are doing as well. And the business model is that we do a revenue share with 1,400 bloggers in our network. And we don't do a revenue share with the advertising on blog production. We also started the conferences as a sort of a grassroots thing and their continued to be priced at a grassroots level of $99 a day except for a big business conference which is able for the fourth and the north. But they've turned out to be an opportunity for us to develop relationships with sponsors that we bring into the network. And though what are people not doing in order to spend time blogging? Well, I'm sorry to tell you that since the internet became the majority medium that people have been running from television magazines and newspapers, but what's interesting is that bloggers tend to run to news and information sites as well as other blogs. So I think what we need to do is figure out how to take this publishing network approach and apply it. And other ideas that I'm sure people will have to continue to support the journalism industry that I so love so much who asked was how does it work with the links that we put from the site? And the links that you see from the site are all at this point dynamically served by Drupal from comments created by our editors and our members. The only things that we hard code on the site are in the sidebars or in the little headline links that rotate every day. So we're having an enormously fun time watching the community watch the world go wild. So we exist to be trapped away and these women are on it. We've logged to Twitter before South by Southwest last year, I believe. I think they just after certainly weeks and weeks before the New York Times had it. And the blogger admin network never was launched. There were a number of restrictions or guidelines for bloggers who wish to have ads on their sites. Can you speak about how the status of the program today, accessibility for bloggers and what plans are for the program going forward? Sure. I'm not sure what restrictions you need, but I can tell you how the program works. If you go to bloggerads.com and you wish to sign up, we ask that we be your exclusive rich media provider of graphic advertising above the fold. And by above the fold, we mean in the top 768 pixels on your blog, we need to be able to go into our Fortune 1000 advertisers and say, yes, Kraft, yes, GN, yes, AOL, you're the only ad banner above the fold of bloggers, which is why we actually can't say it's okay if our bloggers work so better ad and voice as well. So we also don't have any limits on traffic or size. What we are looking for is quality. We want people who blog in their topic area two or more times a week because we want these to be active social communities. My personal blog, surfed.typehead.com would never qualify for our network because I spent too much time blogging on blog for a long time. I have qualified types of blogs, qualified topics. The question is are there qualified topics? The only topics that we currently are not accepting are sex blogs because we have to figure out a way to do that. But we have blogs, you go to bloggerads.com and you look at the left and you'll see that we're rotating national network level advertising on parenting, food, entertainment, health. We're starting networks in business, infertility, politics, green, tech, but we're really just sort of getting off the ground on those others. That's a response to that. It's going well. We've had about extraordinary growth. Last year at this time we reached about a million units a month. Today we reached eight million units a month. And so 10 or 11 of our 22 employees are on sales. So we're working hard to catch up with the inventory that we have. But our average CPM will pay an age of $12. Would I, do I wish we sold more inventory? Absolutely. Are we sold out? We are not. Anyone has an insertion order they'd like to discuss would be CPM at the top. We represent some of the best writers on the internet today. And we're just extremely proud because we don't require that you be having millions and millions of years. We do ask that you be an expert writer. Yes, sir. You know, I'm a political blogger and I would say from the beginning it sounds like both parties and the National Candidates were as blue all year with concerns and questions. Do you see them listening now? Is there a chance of seeing some developments by your own work? Thank you so much for asking. We continue to reach out to the Clinton-Omah and McCain campaigns and invite them to come and speak on video with a blogger from their political party. From the left, we have, we have Mora, Karen Smele, who's regularly on CNN. On the right, we have Mary Capperhand from towncall.com. We have any number of other political editors as well on the site, if a candidate prefer them. Our 12 questions are on the site. There will be no surprises. We've also decided that we may as well begin to reshout and ask them to write and to move the 12 questions in our vote manifesto. And in fact, we started trying to answer those questions ourselves. We've gone out and taken the question and searched the sites to find out what's on them. And it's been a very interesting experience. I know that I was quite clear earlier that Longstreet Hillary was a big flop. But what's interesting is that the HillaryClinton.com site does an excellent job with describing exactly what the candidates point to are with regards to reproductive health. The word reproductive health does not even appear on the Barack Obama site. And it's a great exercise in core site organization. Because if you Google, Barackabama.com and reproductive health, you find tons of things that are totally different from you. But they're on the site. So it's fascinating. We'd love to have them. We invited them and their campaigns to blog for 07 in Chicago where we had 800 women. We had two campaigns send representatives. The became campaign and the come campaign. That was it. And every single one of the candidates from the general practice side, all seven of them, showed up at day like the most of the next week. So we took that as a clear signal that we needed to try to be more active in our pursuit. But we haven't successfully got it. We would love to help. That's it. Has I been updated for the site's targeting and the following of the blog and survey? Yes. The original moms for Hillary link that I connected from my blog in December 21st announcing the survey results now redirects to Hillary Clinton's statement on International Women's Day. But if you go to another URL, momsforhillary.com, the site still exists, insist that she has updated it now no longer just links to her health or policy. She's already begun to involve some of her educational links and her links to that economic reform for the middle class. So there has been some movement there. She has yet to open a site for single women. She has yet to open a site targeted in every female background that I'm in. I was just actually wondering about the machine campaign. Because it's sort of famous for being kind of open to Lucy Coosie and for accepting to her journalism general. And whether or not there's been any progress there, I mean, I don't know, I was just wondering if there's because everybody knows that the Obama and women campaigns are very kind of locked down in orderly and the Keynes is not just wondering if there's a sense of possibility. We should try. We absolutely should try. And everyone's really encouraging. Oh, gee, we really love to. No one says no. No one says no, we really love to. You know, we want to do it. Just to know if we can make time, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I really frankly think that if you look at any given day on the campaign, there is never time for anything. And you could, in all fairness, ask why is it that we think we're so special? Why is it that we think these people should drop everything and take 30 minutes to answer 12 questions or even 15 minutes to answer six? And the answer has not come from VHS. It comes best from the community of $8 million whether we reach this, we're committing to send the answers out throughout the whole community if they do this. And that is, don't start your own time to make this come to you. Could you please come to us? That's what we're hearing. One woman in the survey response to some of your HGHs said, you know, I don't have time to drop everything all the time and listen to a solidized debate, but I can completely come to a side I'm familiar with and download YouTube video at my own convenience. And what was interesting was these women were very fair in their responses. They said they would be just as happy, about 50%, 48%, excuse me, said they would be just as happy with a written response to the questions. But I actually think the questions will have more authenticity in their videos. Which is why now that we've found out to try to get the answers on, we're trying to go to YouTube and trying to find video clips. And what's interesting is that questions like, under health care, should health insurance cover birth control? Which is one of the favorite questions under health care. It's an omnipartisan question, it touches exactly what you need to know no matter where you fall on the slide. It is really articulately addressed on one of the sites. On Hillary Clinton's site, it is not at all addressed on Barack Obama's attorney's site. That doesn't mean they don't have an answer, right? So we don't want to be unfair. And so we're trying to, if the Sunlight Foundation were to investigate our coverage of this, how well would we do? Are we being as fair as possible? Which is one of the reasons why we can't try to answer these questions for the candidates. We put it out to the community and say, okay guys, here's what we found. What have we done? What have we missed? Did we screw up? And unfortunately, I have someone who wrote about the should health care cover of reproductive into the birth control, excuse me. And it was really challenging because all I could find out in the case I had to do was abortion. And so I had to link to it and I had to quote it. But it was utterly and wildly inadequate. I'm all very helpful. Sir. If you kind of go back to what you said about don't look inside women, that's from an advertising context. An advertiser or a respected advertiser, we're coming to you, thinking about how to reach women on your site. How would you want to guide them about the different types of women that are there, best ways to reach a target? Well, I think I would say, first of all, what are your goals? Are you trying to get the product tested? Are you trying to get the product adopted? Do you want the product adopted? Right? What is your plan? Because, again, we have various different ways in which we can help an advertiser. If they want to reach out to the $8 million, people we reach every month, they can advertise on our blogs. They can offer a product sample out on our $1,400 blogs. Or they can take out a placement in special offers, which is a section on blog.com where they can offer up a free sample. It's all about sort of customizing. And this is what is really changed by the advertising business. I would say that 40% of the advertising RFPs or requests or calls that we see ask for some kind of customized approach to the user. Right? I'm getting nods from the audience. And I think it's perfectly reasonable. I think they're smart to ask this because we really do know what they have to use when they are. So we can easily talk to them. So, for example, we've had, we've given away hundreds of Disney DVDs for the new Princess DVD. We've had women write in and say, why they should be the ones to sample a new Kenneth Cole reaction uniform for boys, or up with boys, and those of us who dress as little boys. It's really hard to find these number out in two seconds. I guess, just to qualify a little bit, are you seeing that the advertisers are thinking differently than the architects that they were thinking before when they were approaching their site? It really depends on the advertisers. It used to be that advertisers fell into free hands. Those who were never ever going to advertise on blogs, those who were absolutely running through the blogs, like, absolutely, they were going to be very big. Maybe they wanted to advertise there, or what was just trying to reduce your CVM as much as possible. And then people in the middle, they're being told they should do it, they kind of want to do it, they don't know how to do it. Now, what we're finding is a much more sophisticated approach. They've been in this space for a while, and what they're looking for is moving way beyond the visual impression or the CPM. What they're interested in is adoption, they're interested in authentic interaction with bloggers, they want a reaction of some kind. And so what we try to do is come up with campaigns where they can do that, but still not an art of bloggers doing the original editorial writing that they wanted to do, and why they part of this in the first place. Is that answer your question? Thank you. Sure. Thank you. I wonder if you could speak a bit about Open Source specifically. It sounds like you have a great community, and I was curious about how you grew in in the first year or so specifically. Sure. So when bloggers started as a community, well, this crazy grassroots conference that we've been together for four months, 305 women came to the conference and sold out. And people in the conference were saying, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? So afterwards, we did a survey of the women who had attended and we said, what would you like? And they said, we'd like briefings. More conferences, please. We'd like some kind of hub where we can come and find each other. Even those of us who use RSS feeds don't read all 1,000 of them every single day. Help, please, do the internet for us. And the third thing they said was, you know, we'd really like a better business model with Google AdSense. Love Google AdSense works really well for us, but we'd like to get paid a little bit more. So with the news club, what we did specifically was we were trying to figure out how, as three women who split the conference, the initial conference facility on our credit cards, we could figure out a way to put together a network capable of supporting at least half of the 305 women, right? So Drupal was really our only choice at the time. It was the only way that we could invite other women to do right out of the site. And what we didn't want was our version of what women were saying to three of us. We really wanted to do community journalism. We wanted to go to one of the more experts in business blocking, women who were experts in technology blocking, experts in family blocking, experts in food blocking in the state. And then you tell us what's hot. You tell us what's expert. You know, we're generalists here. We need you to follow the trends. We launched on January 30th, 2006 with 60 editors at Drupal who, in a slight, even more badly designed than the one that we have today, you know, at my home. We had a company that bought editors raw volunteer. The people who designed the site or did it as a volunteer thing for the first six months, we launched the network and we got it off the ground. This is in January 30th, 2006. And we launched that our first block was a typehead block that we had up for nine months. Yeah, love type. Does that answer your question? I just, you know, totally love open source. Wish I had been an engineer. So one of the problems that you faced, anything like this, this is some sort of financial sustainability and we as an organization which spins off, we've got both for-profit and non-profit entities, but it's always looking for ways to fund these things. Think a lot about different strategies for that financial sustainability. And so I'm particularly curious around within your transition from a non-profit model to pay if there's money coming in for you and for the rest of the community, how did you manage that transition? And were there challenges, either once you expected, would be there and didn't show up or once you did expect that they'd represent themselves? That's a great question. So for starters, we initially thought hard about being a data worker, a factory blocker, a data worker, C4L, our first block. But when the call for an ad at work or a better business model came out from the community, we decided we needed to really go for it because based on the statistics I mentioned earlier, you can see what an incredible force of American women are as a consumer. And having worked in that field before, when I went to women.com, it became a top 30 website and I launched the site and included a bunch of first magazines and also retail magazines as well. So it's very familiar with the for-profit publishing model, right? And so we decided we would go to the.com and we decided to incubate a quality publishing sending approach. I had actually done this before. I launched the lot.com block network for American lawyer media with the fall of conspiracy and others in November 2004. That's the first one I'm aware of. After that, I consulted the land media. Today there's sort of a block network of fashionistas and they decided to do block.com because while I love ideal holistic, I get to think about that for one hour a week. So, blog.com was born and our goal was really to create opportunities for all women in block on trying to figure out how to work all together. We started with 26 blocks of incubated and excuse me, 34 blocks of incubated in June of 2006. All of them were parody blocks because we knew that we had to really focus on a target demographic. The problem with going on to tell a story is you have to be sustained, particularly with advertisers. And parody blocks were really untapped marketing and these women were the best thing I ever read as a parent and again, I'm the only co-founder of these parents so I decided I could figure it out. So, the launch of them, we sold out of it immediately. And advertisers said to us, if only you were 10 times better. And so, we developed a site called bloggerads.com, this time pain, the group of group that had developed our first site. And in September of 2006, we launched blogger ads in group from 34 blocks to about 160. And then we had to shut down the network six weeks because we had so much demand and we had one saleswoman, my partner, Jordan. So then we started really serious about thinking, okay, what's gonna happen here? And what we didn't like was there were other blog networks that had started and they insisted that the women in participating in that was be huge. Excellent blogs, these networks have fantastic blogs, but they have to be of a certain size to participate. And we really felt like our mission was to create an opportunity for all women in the blog to figure out a way to make a better dollar, right? So we didn't like that and we decided we would try to hire on a couple of sales contractors, et cetera, and ultimately we decided we needed to either go for a date or pull it back and only do the conferences. And so we decided to accept an already venture capital investment and this is my fourth job with a company that has been the capital funded. And you know, venture capital is not my favorite thing, but we got really really lucky this time. We decided to accept an investment from Dave Simmel. And he's a guy who launches BART Networks, which owns J&A in American Singles, in Capitol Bay, and on the S&A he really knows the online consumer. And he also works for info.com, which is a mobile device. And finally we found someone who can talk about the consumer likelihood. They can really understand what you're going for here and it's been a wonderful experience. We're really really happy with it. And I think that the best advice I ever got about a decision on that came from Cameron Faye, the co-founder of Flickr. She told me and Alisa Camport, remember, people first, turn to second, valuation third. She said, if you love the people, you'll come up with reasonable terms and the valuation will be worth it. If you don't, the end will still be true.