When I was getting myself organised earlier this year I started seeing lots of excited tweets about upcoming conferences – and one of them was Cybher. I bagged a ticket for what would be a sold-out event.
Three things I thought were great
- I met some tweeters in real-life, saw old friends again, and of course met lovely new people and by extension, discovered some new-to-me blogs. On that note, hello to Alexandra, Emma, Judy, Tara, Rosie. It was really invigorating and I came away with a list of things to -well, to at least think about, if not get around to doing them!
- Literally the best goody bag ever – as it was a custom mini satchel from the Leather Satchel company which is going to work perfectly as an iPad bag and should fit the keyboard in too (faffy but better than humping my old doorstop of a laptop about)
- Some great sponsors – although Freya are my favourite lingerie company I wasn’t in the mood for a fitting but it’s good to know what nursing bra options they have are as I’m bored to death with the utilitarian M&S ones I have. I heard grey leopardskin mentioned… And I came away with lots of Palmers new formula lotions and potions for stretch marks. Certainly smells nice, will report back on it in due course.
Three pieces of feedback for next time
if the ladies have the energy do to it again!
- Loved the venue and its location – I wonder if the pink lighting throughout was bespoke for Cybher’s branding? Although all the afternoon sessions I attended were in the ‘Annex’ which got very noisy with people coming and going behind, visiting the make-up station etc. The fresh orange juice was amazing but I think I got to the sandwich selection a little late and was a little disappointed.
- Some fabulous speakers – although for things like the ‘Ask A Blogger’ panel, I’d have preferred if there had been a moderator keeping them fed with subjects. The ladies did a very fine job, but I suspect it would have been easier if they’d just been answering the audience’s questions especially when some rather left-field questions popped up.
- Huge kudos for the tech achievements – the wifi got a bit overloaded occasionally but I was impressed with the commitment to being paper-free. A few of us had problems accessing the QR code schedules, so it would have been great to have more pre-prepped tweets with schedule info going out throughout the day. Was impressed that they successfully ran one session as a vimeo livecast as the speaker wasn’t able to be there in person.
Future of blogging?
There was a real mix of women there who blog about beauty, fashion, kids and parenting, erotica, budgeting, lifestyle and on and on. There was lots of mentions of niche blogging – possibly a reflection of so many of the well known bloggers who were there, who have mature blogs they’ve worked hard on for a long time with what’s probably evolved into a reasonably specific remit. I met lots of people who wondered if they should perhaps aim for a more narrow focus.
I thought about that. Then realised that I read most of those blogs because I like their voice and the glimpse of life as much as for the specific subject matter. The reason I set this blog up, rather then starting to expand what I wrote about here was that I wanted this to go back to how I began blogging – almost an online diary, a craft log, and probably for a niche audience – of my family, hah – by default! However I made close real-life and online friends through my first blog in 2006, by writing about things that were important to me.
So the best thing about Cybher was that I came home all revved up about blogging again. I talked to (at?) Mr D about Tumblr and whether to consider moving to WordPress which I’m more familiar with – and then he did an amazing half hour tutorial about markdown and Disqus, blog UX, reminded me about CSS and reconverted me. Being married to a geek is all kinds of awesome.
Then I fell into bed, pretty much knackered. All in all, a good day’s work.
One Million Gold Stars 