Also, cost is a big deal for a lot of attendees and this means BlogHer has to negotiate for the best deals they can find. I’m going to guess they got a better deal by booking the whole shebang. And, flights to Chicago are often direct and cheaper. The main conference is not really a professional conference, in my opinion (though BlogHer Biz is, and they’re making them back-to-back). The vast majority of those 1000 attendees are writing personal blogs. They’d love to get paid, and how to do that is a big part of the conference. But blogging is a labor of love for most of them and thus they don’t have a lot of money to spend.

1000 people at a convention is pretty small stuff, even for dinky PDX.

Although, it would have been the second time in a row the conference was held on the West Coast, BlogHer is based in Cali, so I think a case could have been made that it would be less costly for a PDX conference.

If cost and other criteria were leaning in Portland’s favor, but wasn’t awarded due to facilities, that is definitely something that should be raised/discussed with the City. If only to evaluate what other conferences we’ll continue to lose out on because of a lack of space. The BlogHer conference alone would have brought over 1,000 bloggers and corporate sponsors to Portland.

I’m going to be learning a lot about this for Open Source Bridge, so hopefully we’ll be able to share some best practices for large-ish conference organizing in Portland.

For BlogHer’s audience, a centrally-located destination makes good sense, although I didn’t think the facilities in Chicago were that popular with attendees at the second BlogHer.

Thanks for reporting this….