More than 5000 attendees, mostly bloggers, settled in at the NYC Hilton today as the BlogHer 2012 Conference kicked off late this afternoon. This is the 7th year of the conference and there are 5000 attendees. It’s the biggest conference yet .

I remember my first conference when I was a newbie. It was 2007 and I had just started blogging. There were only about 500 bloggers in the audience at the time. Wow, how times have changed. Blogging is definitely trending positive.

Today things started off at 4:30 p.m., as President Obama spoke via satellite to a very large crowd. The bloggers cheered and were excited to hear what our current prez had to say. He wanted to address the group because as he says “Women make up more than 50 percent of the population in the U.S.A. and they are important when it comes to the vote.” He reinforced that “The ability to solve our problems is within our grasp.” (Yes, I do hope so dear prez because if we don’t solve our problems no one else will.)

After the opening session I went to a few of the exhibits and ran into some fellow boomer girls. Seeing my virtual blogger buddies in real life is always such fun.

I headed straight to the Kohler booth to learn all about their new VibrAcoustic bathtub. “This new technology brings the transformative forces of music and water together into a bathing experience like no other,” says the promo. “You just plug in a smartphone, lie back and soak as the sound waves resonate through your body.” My life after 50 will be pretty grand (and likely full of wrinkles all over) if I win the grand prize of one of these tubs. Ooh, la,la. I’ll definitely be blogging from my bathroom, if I win, if I win, if I win.

My second stop was to the Zeo booth where I learned all about the Zeo Sleep Manager Pro tool that can track your sleep. You wear a Zeo head piece to sleep and it records different data on how well and how long you sleep. Zeo also now makes sheets that cool you off. Sounds like a good idea for those nights when I have my hot flashes. Uh, oh, the Zeo advice for a good night’s sleep says “DON’T use the computer within an hour of bedtime.” Their data shows that it can decrease a woman’s time in REM sleep!

I better get off my iPad now and get good REM, as I have a busy day at BlogHer 2012 tomorrow.

Judi