I don?t have time to do justice to the subject, but I?d like to mention two events: this year?s Blogathon and the Blogher conference.

I participated in the Blogathon a couple of years ago. For 24 hours, I posted every half hour. For me this translated into nearly continuous writing with bathroom breaks & interludes of reading other people?s Blogathon entries. I didn?t sleep. I raised a few hundred bucks for charity through reader pledges. It was a wild rollercoaster of a writing exercise! It was writing as a spectator sport or as performance art. This year?s Blogathon looks exciting? I have only cruised a few of the ongoing 24-hour freakouts, revelations, streams of consciousness, explorations, and art projects, so this is not a ?best of? list. Take a look at:

Seeworthy?s 24-hour exploration of fat lib and body issues
Portraits for a Purpose: two artists draw portraits of each other every half hour, and post the results. Watch them go insane for hours!
Three Moms and a Single Lady - ?Four sexy ladies talking about sex?. It?s sort of touching and earnest. Oh, those ladies!
Disconnected - Driving around posting from a different hotspot for every post. On the Road! this guy doesn?t have a huge amount to say, or time to say it in, but you have to admire the extreme nerdiness.

The Blogher conference was a hoot. Reality and the recording of reality were happening at such a fast pace no one could keep up. I skipped all the political panels and talks about technology & instead went to storytelling, identity blogging, and mommyblogging sessions. What a lot of fierce mouthy loud activist right-on feminists! It was like flying an airplane into a hurricane. I?m still reading the fallout on blogs like I am Dr. Laura?s Worst Nightmare, Multidimensional Me, and .

I?m so out of touch that it surprised me that some women dissed the idea of mommyblogging as ?dumb arguments over whether to breastfeed or not.? Stuff like that, as if just because we were breeders and talked about it, we had no brains and as if everything we talk about must be takedowns of each other?s parenting. NOT. The mommybloggers were powerful strong women who never shut up. Never! Part of what makes it political to blog and be a mom is the immense pressure on women, once they breed, to be self-abnegating. Case in point, people think that blogging as a parent endangers children. ("What if some creep off the internet stalks your kids?") We heard stories like Alice?s from fussy - how one of her readers threatened to call Child Protective Services on her because she wrote about her 4 year old son?s penis. ?Try getting HIM to shut up about his penis,? she responded. Take my word for it, the pressure is huge on moms to stay out of public discourse, or to keep their mom-ness out of it and live out a schizophrenic divide that does no one any favors. What the mommybloggers think of each other is that it?s a brave political act to refuse to divide whatever else you?re writing about from your role as a mom and a feminist.

For example, Jo Spanglemonkey?s discussion of an obnoxious transphobic post by Ambra Nykol, a conservative Christian attendee of Blogher:

What I was thinking about Ambra was that she thinks she is exempt. She thinks that because she knows herself to be an individual, not actually reducible to her skin color or her gender (or god only knows how she thinks of herself: the mind boggles to think of the kind of self-co-opting and self-flagellatory participation in one?s oppression that is implied by her political affiliation) that she can rise above the kind of discrimination that might be aimed her way. She thinks, in other words, that it won?t happen to her.

What mommybloggers do, at their best, is to complicate & explore the ways we aren?t exempt.

A final note about Blogher: Everyone should take a look at Ka-Ping Yee?s nifty tool, Regender, which he developed the night before the conference. It lets you surf the web with pronouns and first names gender-swapped. I can?t recommend it highly enough! It?s mindbending to read the news, or just everything you normally read, with genders reversed. You can neutralize gendered language too; try the other buttons at the top of the page once you start surfing.