Fake or Real?

I've been watching the Blogher '09 tweets fly fast and furious for the past few days and feeling a combination of regret and relief that I'm not there. Regret because it sounds like such FUN - and so many people who I've gotten to know and really like through twitter and their blogs are there, all in one place. I could meet them in person! And that's where the relief kicks in... there's a certain safety in the 'anonymity' of tweeting and blogging. But once you meet someone IRL, once you can put a face to the name, things change. It's the Seinfeld "world's colliding" scenario.
Online life is often completely segregated from real world. In some cases its logistics. Some of my favorite twitter friends are in Canada, and Seattle, and Maine. It would be tough for us to get together for lunch. But Blogher, THAT we could coordinate, maybe. But what if we don't like each other in person, what if it just doesn't translate? That would just blow, but odds are, that's the last thing that would happen. People are who they are, regardless of which world they are in... If you like someone on line, you'll like them in person.
The other source of the relief centers on the conference itself. It's a BLOGGING conference - If I went to Blogher, since I'm an attendee and a chick, people would think that *I* was a BLOGGER. I'd be totally misrepresenting. *I*m not a blogger.... I mean, yes, I have a blog - you are reading it, so you know that. But I'm not, like, a BLOGGER. REAL bloggers post every single day, and make money and have sponsors and fans and banner ads and are so WAAAAAY cooler than me. I just blog sometimes, I'm not really a BLOGGER. HerBadMother and Sweetney (really everyone at MamaPop), and basically all the smart clever women I've met on twitter, THOSE are BLOGGERS. Me? I'm a just chick with a Blog...(see: 'Impostor Syndrome')
But maybe, just maybe, not everyone at that conference makes six figures a year off of their adsense accounts. Maybe the conference is full of women just like me - normal people, who blog when they can, as best they can, not because they have a huge adoring audience who demands it, but because they like to - who go to the conference because they want to meet other people, just like them, who just blog for the love of it.
Or maybe they go just for the swag...
Either way, I'm thinking I need to start saving now for 2010...