I know we’re in September and #cybermummy seems like it was months ago, but I figured I’d blog about it anyway.

Firstly, to the wonderful ladies who spent not an inconsiderable amount of time organising it – thank you.  You did a fantastic job.  The venue was fabulous and perfectly located.  The choices for key note and crowd sourced key note speakers were, well, superb.

I wasn’t sponsored to go to the event in June.  The ticket arrived with me as a Christmas present from The Hot Geek after I’d spent weeks telling how much I’d really like to go because everyone raved about last years and how I felt a little sad that I couldn’t go – we were sunning ourselves inSpainfor the 2010 conference.

I won’t lie, I was absolutely shitting myself really nervous about going.   I was travelling toLondon on my own and I was massively aware that I didn’t know anyone.

I’d done my research before hand and read up on each one of the workshops and decided which ones I was going to attend.

The first workshop I attended was the The Writing Workshop being lead by Sophie King and in all honesty – I was disappointed with it.  I didn’t really get very much from it.  I have no desire to write a novel and this workshop was, in my opinion, heavily geared towards bloggers who want to use their blog to launch themselves as a novelist and that really isn’t me.

Please don’t get me wrong, I understand fully that some bloggers want to be novelists and this was reflected by some of the people who attended the workshop – people who clearly got something out of it.  But when Ms King was asked questions from bloggers who didn’t want a writing career it was obvious that she didn’t really understand the needs of her audience as a whole.

One blogger was told that perhaps she should change the name of her blog so it stood out to people about who she was and what she was about and that she should write about a single subject.  I’m not sure Ms King really grasped that for some, their blog names are how people know them, how they identify with them.  Blog Names aren’t book titles.  You don’t change them dependent on the ‘storyline’ of your next post.

Another blogger was told that her weekly post link up should be held somewhere separate to the rest of her blog because it seemed quite a niche thing to do.  Ms King didn’t, in my opinion, understand that the link up posts are part of someones blog and aren’t something they want to keep separate.

About half way through the workshop, bloggers started to leave and I can understand why.  Me, I stayed in the hope that I’d get something out of it.

I didn’t.

My experience wasn’t helped by the fact that we were paired off for a hands-on session.  Ms King gave us prompts such as a single word or an example subject and we were asked to write a short creative piece, only a few lines, based on that prompt.  The reason for the exercise was to bounce idea’s off your partner and see how we could inspire each other only my partner didn’t acknowledge I was in the room and instead chose to sit on her laptop.

I felt really let down and the session left me questioning both myself and my reasons for blogging.

In reality, the whole day wasn’t negative.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the speakers as part of the Blogger to Blogger inspiration session.

The Girl is a major part of why I write and what I write about.  I’ve often wondered about how I out how I can get her involved in my blog but I’d never thought about video blogging.  Until I sat in and listened to My Daddy Cooks talk about his experience with video and how he gets his little one’s involved.

But for me… the absolute highlight of my day was putting faces to names and meeting everyone – especially those I tweet more regularly perhaps than others!

The first words I heard when I arrived at Cybermummy were uttered by the rather delicious Jay who, across a crowded reception bellowed “OH MY GOD, I’D RECOGNISE THOSE TITS ANYWHERE!!!!!” and then proceeded to hug me as if she’d known me for years.   I don’t think I stopped smiling for ages afterward!

So there you go, my rambled take on Cybermummy.

Late I know, but hey, better late than never!