Oh Well, At Least I Tried

The New York Times has an article in Monday's paper about BloggerCon, which I wrote about below. I had my fingers crossed that I would get quoted in the article, which would have been so freaking awesome, but it was not to be. During the "Blogging as Business" session, I got there after all of the seats were filled and sat on the floor near the front of the room. A few minutes later, a woman got there and squeezed in next to me. Her nametag labeled her as Julie Flaherty, New York Times. "Serendipity," I thought to myself. "Somehow, I must at least make an attempt to get quoted in her article, because that would be ridiculously cool." So, I carefully formulated a pithy soundbite: "Writing a weblog is fun; talking about weblogs, not so much." And at one particularly boring moment during the discussion, she turned over in my direction, and I caught eye contact, and decided to share my "spontaneous" thought. She laughed, and wrote it down. And asked me my name. And wrote it down. "Cool!" I thought. A minute later, getting greedy, I formulated another pithy sound bite after someone mentioned they spend 5-6 hours a day trying to sell ads on their site. "Blogging is supposed to be fun. People want to make money doing it because it's fun. Selling ads 6 hours a day doesn't sound like fun. It sounds like work." She scribbled that down too. I figured if I said anything else she'd think I was just being annoying, or trying to get quoted. Or maybe she figured that all along, since she didn't use my quotes in the article. But the article was short, and she had lots of pages of notes she took. I wasn't really expecting to get quoted, but it would have been so, so, so, so cool. I'm a little disappointed. But I can't feel too bad. At least I tried. I would've been annoyed at myself had I not at least tried. At least she laughed and wrote it down. That made my day at least a little bit.

NOTE 1: One particular blog mentioned in the article currently gets an average of 367 visits/day, its sitemeter says, with about 450 on a weekday. I am profoundly curious what happens to that number over the next few days, based on the article. I have no idea how to predict how many NYTimes readers will follow the link, especially readers not reading online, but I am really, really curious.

NOTE 2: I'm sort of heartened by the fact that one person there, who was *clearly* trying to impress the NY Times reporter, and went so far as to pass her a note -- and he actually runs a real business that does stuff, so it might have been legitimate to quote him -- is not mentioned in the article. Good for Julie Flaherty!