Editor’s Note: Lee Woodruff, New York Times bestselling author of In an Instant: A Family’s Journey of Love and Healing and Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress and wife of ABC’s Bob Woodruff, is mingling among 1,500 female bloggers at the fifth annual BlogHer ‘09 "In Real Life" conference. The four-day long event at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago aims to unite women who write and express themselves online. From up-and-coming Web editors to respected and established voices in media, all walks of cyberspace are brought together – in real life – through group workshops, parties and sponsored events. In the spirit of the engagement, Lee’s blogging for wowOwow … Click here to read more about Lee.

When I finally got to the Sheraton Hotel, the humming beehive of the BlogHer conference, a three-day event with panels, breakout sessions, speeches and parties on a variety of blogging and media topics, I was wondering what kind of women would be inside. Would they be of all ages? Young and hip and pierced? Mom-ish, like me? In fact the thousands of women visiting the convention floor and pouring over the booths with new products and foods and innovations looked a lot like a cross-section of women everywhere, from grandmas to stiletto-wearing 20-somethings.

But these are women in the know, on the forefront of connection through technology. Outside of the conference, the tourists buzzing around Michigan Avenue have no idea that inside the hotel, 2,500 female bloggers with a combined reach of millions more, are there to share information about new media and technologies, to connect, share ideas and also to facilitate a conversation about how to get more purpose in their life.

After tweeting all morning and asking people to join our Tweet-Up, at 12:15 I sat down to moderate the PepsiCo "Live With Purpose" panel with Jill Beraud, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at the organization.

The panel included Maria Niles, a blogger at Fizz; Paula Gregorowicz, a life coach; Anita Tedaldi Doberman, a military mom with five children (whom she brought to the conference) and whose husband had been deployed five times; Krystyn Heide, a Web designer and developer; Erin Kotecki Vest, a producer for BlogHer.com; Jeanne Beacom, a fashionista; Aliza Sherman, a Web pioneer and social media strategist; and Beth Feldman founder of RoleMommy.com and BeyondPR.

PepsiCo had set up the panel as part of their corporate "Performance With Purpose" mission. They wanted to listen to customers and start a conversation about how and why women find a greater sense of purpose in their lives beyond all the many hats women wear. They had asked me to moderate the panel based on my work with Remind.org. My own story of my husband Bob’s injury and his miraculous recovery, which led to the creation of our foundation to help wounded families, was one of the many stories out there that creates an example of living with purpose.

Our foundation’s own Tweet to Remind initiative, to raise a dollar for each of the 1.65 million who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan has, to date, raised more than $150,000 for the cause, proving that social media can be mobilized to do good.

During the hour, which was carried on BlogTalk radio, we fielded tweets from people around the county who weighed in about finding purpose through caring for their 80-year-old father or working for Habitat for Humanity. One mom said she would take her son around to meet our wounded heroes in the military hospitals.

The one-hour conversation had no pause and, if anything, could have continued for another four. One of the most interesting and affirming things to me was that nine women who did not know each other found, as women do, an immediate common ground about the issues of the ways they try to give back. When military blogger Anita began to talk about staying strong for her kids with a husband in Iraq and became emotional, one woman took out her tissues and others came over to lay a hand on her shoulder. More than anything, this small but powerful moment was an illustration of what women do best – connect over those common pulse points.