Afromusing

BlogHer Conference – Women and blogging

I was fortunate to attend one of the sessions today at the BlogHer conference in Chicago (Thanks KenyanPundit!) BlogHer brings together women bloggers to talk, share, learn and network.
You can follow along with the bloggers writing, taking pictures, and uploading videos by visiting the event site for live blog URLs.
The session was on how to use the internet to support your cause. It was titled “Getting it on(line) for a cause part 2″ Raising consciousness.
Rochelle Robinson -online campaign strategist had a wonderful presentation which you can have a look at here. Its a must read for anyone with a cause – Its concise, specific and has some great examples of how tech can be used effectively. One such example she pointed to is Hollaback. Women had gotten tired of street harassment, so they took pictures of their harassers and wrote about it on the blog.

Green LA girl was next with a great idea of using del.icio.us for a cause. What she and another blogger were able to do was to collect and tag information relating to the starbucks challenge. The idea was to challenge people who visit starbucks to specifically ask for fair trade coffee since starbucks had stated they would be selling fair trade coffee at every location. Turns out it was a promise that was easier said than done…Green LA girl and others were able to prove that it was not the case in all locations. The information they gathered was used by another blogger to create a google map of the locations where people had reported succcess in getting a cup of fair trade coffee and locations where they werent so successful. Read more about the challenge here and the google map is here. It might be a great idea for tracking the elections in Kenya, tagging information regarding constituencies and perhaps mapping it onto Mzalendo’s growing database of information. Just a thought…either way get tagging!

I will be participating on a panel tomorrow with Georgia Popplewell of Global Voices! and Amira Al Hussaini. I will carry the laptop and do a post after we are done with that.

Posted in: Tech, Women

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Tech, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.