MilBlog Coference 2006 (a day late and a dollar short...)

Dateline: Washington, DC
Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the first MilBlog Conference in Washington. I spent about 3 hours Tuesday night putting together a post with links, photos, etc, and just as I was finishing up when Internet Explorer 'encountered a problem and had to shut down.' AAAAAHHHHHH!!!! I'm working six days per week/12 hours per day so I don't have a lot of time to do much of anything. So I finally got around to doing it again today.
For those of you who do not know, MilBlogs are military bloggers who have their own weblog, for the most part, or are very strong supporters. There were a lot of the biggies in the MilBlog world there. Some of the ones I met were Andi, who organized the conference, Matt, Jimbo, Smash, Smink, CJ, Carla, Chuck and Carren, Deb, Jeff and a lot of others. John from the Castle was live blogging on Saturday from the conference and he covered the days events pretty well.
I also got to meet some of the Castle Denizens/Denizennes, like John and Beth, AFSis, Sgt. B, Boston Maggie, and miss Fuzzy. I read on Andi's site that there were over 1,000 attendees, both in person and on the web. Several of the Castle folks were participating online. It gave them a chance to 'be there without being there.' Click on any of them to get their take on the day's activities. Others I got to meet were ArmyWifeToddlerMom, HomefrontSix, LL, SK, and probably some I'm leaving out. Oh, and talk about a small world. I was talking to SK at FOB Friday night, and it turns out she sent me videotapes in Afghanistan for my Read To Your Kids program. She had read about it on AnySoldier.com. Marty Horn from AnySoldier was there, but he left before I got a chance to shake his hand.
Those following the conference on the web missed out on the Friday night 'meet and greet' at Fran O'Brien's. THAT is an entire story by itself. Fuzzy has a pretty good collection of FOB stories. The web watchers also missed out on the pub crawl Saturday night. It was fun and if you read some of the other bloggers, you'll see some of the fun happenings. I also had a chance to do some sightseeing while I was there. Arlington was my favorite and always will be. The history that is there is just fascinating.
I'm looking forward to the next one, whenever and where ever it may be. I wouldn't mind going back to DC. I've been there four or five times and still haven't seen everything.
If you go to the various sites to read about the conference, remember that it was a week ago and you may have to go looking.