Last night, after closing the 12-hour marathon chatroom session we hosted for BlogHer Conference '05, I send a short email to to woman who had the initial notion to throw such an event, Lisa Stone:

You do realize that you've given birth to a monster, don't you? This baby is going to grow grow grow....

Congratulations to you all.

I clicked "send," let out a big breath, went downstairs ... and started to cry.

The chatroom was an unqualified success, despite the last-minute challenges (which I'll write about later). I don't have any official numbers, but the room was busy the entire time. Late morning and early afternoon seemed to be the peak times, with some 30-40 people in the room chatting all at once. You almost had to speed-read just to keep up. I was also pleased to see some eminent bloggers check in and stay a while. With the sensational live bloggers like Socal Mom, Spanglemonkey and Mary Beth (whose shoe blogging was a hoot) giving us near-real-time reports from the scene, we truly felt connected; the Santa Clara meet-up became a global event.

With little gestation time (and a whole lot of effort), BlogHer was born with a loud cry heard worldwide. To have been a part of that, to have helped in a small way to connect what was happening in that conference center of some 300 people, mostly women, to people in the rest of the US, in Canada, in the UK, Spain, France, India, China and who knows where else (I've not [yet] scoured the server logs) was a thrill for me.

Right then, when I sent that email, I knew in my bones that this was but the first of what will grow into something much bigger than any of us can imagine.

Looking at the Technorati tagged posts on Blogher--

-- which seem to update rather aggravatingly haphazardly -- I wonder if Technorati is getting overwhelmed with traffic that they can't keep up -- I mean, today were popping up posts written days ago, and our own posts here seem to appear there only in something like 18-hour intervals--

-- I feel a mixture of intense excitement and intense sorrow and regret that I'm not there. Having been involved in some big collaborative ventures like this, I can feel that thrill of seeing all those happy people show up for something you helped put together.

You can see the excitement on their faces. I'm glad to be a part of it, if only very remotely. But looking at all those women there in one place, there to hear each other, connect with each other, learn from each other, well, it's something special.

I'm very frustrated with the tardiness of Technorati, so it looks like catching the live bloggers will require a bit of hunting on the Bloglines list.

I confess I've been a bit put-off by IRC over the past few years. I'd used it for years in the '90s as a clunky-but-effective way to chat with a number of people at once. But the definitive experience for me was in 2001, when I was in an IRC chat on women's issues (we'll leave it at that) and a troll came after me. He (and I assume it was a he, but I cannot be sure) was able to not only grab my IP address, but also my ISP logon ID. I thought he was a hacker, savvy in the arcane ways of IRC (and there are plenty of those). But sure enough, I was able to do the same thing on everyone else there. That was a shocker.

The troll pestered me via email for a few days, and the default account started getting flooded with spam. I was safe, but still felt quite violated. Since then, aside from a brief attempt to join a "trusted" chatroom using a client for my newly acquired Mac, which resulted in crashy failure, I've not ventured into IRC.

So when Lisa Stone asked me if we could host some sort of online chat for BlogHer, I did not make the impulsive leap to IRC.