…and I get something with the subject line “Invite: BloggerCon, Harvard Law, Oct 4.” Click on it, and glance through it, and it appears that I am, in fact, being invited to speak at a conference on blogging. Normally this would fall on my list of “situations in which I most hope someday to find myself” maybe slightly above waking up in a hotel room bathtub full of ice with my kidneys missing, but I do have this book I need to promote at the moment, and since my publisher doesn’t think it’s worth the money to send me out on a book tour, I’m a little more open to the idea of a free trip to Boston right now. So I scroll through the rest of the email to see if there’s at least some sort of honorarium involved, and when I get to the bottom, I find to my astonishment that what I’m actually reading is an invitation to pay $500 to attend a conference on blogging.
A conference on blogging as it existed in, say, November of 2001, I might add, with the left side of the blogosphere notable primarily for its absence. Even leaving myself out of the question — where’s Kos, or Atrios? They’re two of the most widely-read bloggers by any standard you want to use, and most importantly by the only measurement that actually matters: site traffic.
But you know, even if Kos and Atrios were both attending — hell, even if the panels were moderated by naked supermodels flown in specially for the occasion — $500 to spend a weekend listening to people talk about blogging?
Sweet Jesus. Give me the bathtub full of ice.