Monica, Jonathan and Charlie were in San Francisco over the weekend for the annual BlogHer Conference. Designed to create opportunities for women bloggers in areas of education, community, exposure and economic empowerment, this year’s BlogHer Conference has scheduled sessions focusing on MommyBlogging, Green/Social Change and Food, Race and Gender, the Commercial Momosphere, War & Peace, and photography (sponsored by Picnik!).

One attendee and weekend recipient of a free Picnik Premium membership, Ohmommy, is giving away two free year-long subscriptions to Picnik Premium! Just leave her a comment before Wednesday night!

Meanwhile, for all you bloggers who couldn’t make it to San Francisco and see our press pack, Picnik has all sorts of tools designed to making your photoblogging as seamless and awesome as possible. For instance, here is a plug-in that integrates Picnik into Movable Type, and one that integrates Picnik into Wordpress, plus Picnik supports sending photos to a number of blogging platforms via the “Email to Web Site” feature in the Save and Share tab, including such useful places as TypePad, Tumblr, Windows Life Spaces and LiveJournal. Plus there’s the “Other” option for others like Blogger!

There are also some handy browser plug-ins, such as the Firefox extension bloggers have made so popular, to make editing images on the web (even screenshots of whole web pages!) incredibly convenient.

And for those bloggers who haven’t yet harnessed the power of Picnik, some features commonly used by other bloggers are Resize, Crop, Drop Shadow, Frames, and of course Text!

While Jonathan pounds the pavement in New York this week, the rest of us have been pressing our noses against the glass in Picnik World Headquarters Conference Room A, spying on the newlyweds moving in next door. A pair of common gulls, they so far have made excellent neighbors, keeping their yard tidy, going on walks together around the roof of the annex next door when Mr Gull gets home with the day’s catch of pizza crusts and candy wrappers, and keeping their squawking to a minimum.

Mrs Gull spends her day quietly sitting on her nest, usually facing south but sometimes turning towards the north to put a little variety into her new life as a housewife. We haven’t gotten a glimpse of the eggs yet, but we’re considering climbing up onto the fire escape for a better look.

Somehow, the entire backend/operations team here at Picnik (mike and myself) was convinced to compete in the Issaquah Triathlon. This is a ’sprint’ event consisting of a 1/4 mile swim, 15mi bike, and 3mi run.

Saturday is the day. I’m scheduled to hit the water just after 7am. Mike is a little later at 7:30am.

Oh yeah, while I’ve done a couple of 10K runs, neither of us has ever done a tri before. I think we’re ready, but wish us luck anyway!

Update:

Mike and I finished in around 1hr 33min. We were 11.4s apart!