I wish you and I could sit down for a coffee and candied apples for this one. (Hunch: candied apples are the new cupcakes.)

It’s a story that I want to share with you. About Kirtsy. The good people of Kirtsy and how, as of this week, I came to be a part of the team.

It was a hot, humid summer evening in Chicago. I was hanging out at the rooftop cocktail party at Blogher. It was July 2007 and I had just returned a bag of books to Caroline Donahue that she’d forgotten the night before on the bus. We became insta-friends. Tara Anderson was there. And Milda. And Allison Blass. I had on my yellow pants and frizzy hair.

Someone cracked a mom joke. You know the kind, “your momma’s so blank she blank blanks when she blanks.” To be more specific, it was a your momma joke directed at me. I made a quick, (hopefully witty and not terribly sinister) comeback about how you shouldn’t pick on girls with dead moms. Somehow this elicited a lot of (awkward?) laughter and as I dropped towards the ground laughing, someone caught me. I looked up to see someone I would later learn is Laura Mayes.

We explained what we were laughing about (briefly, hopefully omitting the darker details) and the girls introduced themselves as The! Sk*rt! Chicks! (and I really do remember hearing exclamation marks after each of those words). They gave us tiny tins affixed with light blue stickers. Mints. I commented enthusiastically that they looked like something you’d get at a baby shower.

I got back from this inaugural conference (my first grownup one) and something inside me shimmered. One, I’d caught the conference bug. Two, I’d made a ton of new friends, had started friendships that would last, deeply affecting me. Third, I’d morphed into a Sk*rt “fanlette” as I would write to the then-Sk*rt, now Kirtsy, chicks Laura, Laurie and Gabrielle, a few days after Blogher 2007 ended.

Flash forward eight months.

I find out the girls are throwing an early morning cupcake (OMGOMGOMG!!!) get-together at SXSW in Austin. To some, this is the last place you wanna be at 9am after partying all night, but I plied the mascara off and caught a ride to the soiree with the chicks themselves. Became a Kirtsy Editor that cupcake and coffee morning. A unicorn made a guest appearance. Magic.

The girls and I meet Heather Armstrong (aka Dooce) and I am bowled over, as usual, by their sheer enthusiasm for everything. Everything pretty. Everything inspiring. Everything they love.

I go to Kirtsy for the stories. Always have. It’s about the storyline.

I have favorite users, favorite editors. When there’s a story that has a particularly poignant tenor to it, I promote it to the Editor’s column on the front page. This is what the Editor’s column is there for — we sift through the stories, listening carefully, and bump stories to the top that matter to us; that will probably matter to you.

This isn’t about promoting the latest gadget (although I have more than my fair share of gadgets).
This isn’t about competition (although getting to the front page is rewarding to many).
This is about finding, sharing, learning, growing. This is about our stories.

I woke up in London one morning and went outside to catch a cab. Talking with the cabbie, he summed up London for me. “You never know what it’s going to be from day to day. London changes while we sleep.”

Kirtsy, like London, changes while you sleep. You never know what it’s going to be from day to day and that is what I adore about it. Each day you wake up to find new stories that are pertinent and fresh - we help each other out by sharing the best news, fashion, bits of information that might otherwise be lost in the internetosphere. It’s one of the few sites that I feel “gets” me because it’s about stories and the storytellers behind them. It’s the reason that I called it my feed reader last week. I’m done with feed readers. I want to know what the crowds are reading and decide for myself whether or not to read something once the dust settles. Plus, I like the pithy summary of each story…it’s like taking a nibble before eating the entire cake.

Now that you are dying to eat a candied apple, cupcake or slice of cake (maybe I should become a baker next lifetime), I’d like to let you know a bit more about what I’ll be doing with Kirtsy. The nuts and bolts. Or vodka and tonic. Whatever metaphor you want to run with here.

Working on screencasts. Video to help guide you through the process of registering for the site, for adding “kirtsy this” widgets (and more soon!) to your site. Video, in general…lots of it…coming soon.

Working with Laurie on the backend, code stuff of the site.

Working on Get Satisfaction helping you…get Kirtsy satisfaction.

Attending conferences, meeting you, reaching out, listening to your stories. I don’t want to sell you anything (truth be told, I’m pretty lame-o at selling things). I want to buy from you. Really, I want to buy your story. The price I’m willing to pay is my time. And that’s my personal legacy. That’s my motivation. Always has been.

Secretly, deep down, I’ve always carried my mother with me. Her death at age 30 made a permanent impression on me. It taught me that the one thing that lives on after we’re dead is our stories. Long after I forgot the sound of my mother’s laugh I remember her stories. Long after I forgot her eye color, I remember her jokes. I love to hear stories, I love to share them. What is Kirtsy to me? A place where stories are not only shared; they are sacred.

I don’t speak for every user when I say that. I speak for myself, from my perspective of the site. Kirtsy is about finding and sharing stories - the stories that matter most to us. We’re collecting them for ease of use. We’re archiving them (the way I favorite/archive every “@” reply sent to “@gwenbell” - yes, there is a tiny librarian inside of me - isn’t there one in you?). We’re dialoging around them. We’re passing them on to our daughters and sons.

Earlier this week someone asked me if all I am is a cheerleader with nothing of substance behind my cheering.

Well, my dirty little secret is out. I am a cheerleader. I want my legacy to be that I made it onto this list before I turned 30* - by helping others. And I also want my legacy to be that I made every single day count - by engaging in it with people I loved.

I believe in the power of sharing our stories. I believe in the transformational nature of telling our birth story to the blogosphere. I believe a single video can change the course of history. And I believe that when we are in good company, sharing our stories and being ourselves, we can become anything we can dream up. Anything at all.

I believe mom would be proud of what we’re creating. I believe she’d be proud of me. This is a story I want my children to tell.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” -Rumi

*Once I’m on that list I plan to establish a motherless daughters scholarship to send as many young women as possible to college who may not have had a home life conducive to getting a degree.