I was at the BlogHer conference in New York when one of the panelists commented that “even” her own mother blogs. She called her mother “one of those elder bloggers.” Meaning, she said, “anyone over 50 who blogs.”

I pried my gnarled fingers off my Underwood, slammed down my Ensure and quaked, “Say, what, girlie?” That’s a joke. I would never say anything so ageist, but I did gulp and turned to my daughter to ask, “Might she be talking about moi?”

I am well over 50 and my daughter is well under and yet, blogging wise, she is the senior one. Someone might call her a hottie blogger. She probably wouldn’t object.

But elder blogger really pushed my buttons. Is Maya Angelou an elder poet? Is Annie Leibovitz an elder photographer. Is Madonna an elder rock star?

Not surprisingly, the blogging world is dominated by youngish people. A story in the New York Times said that 53 percent of bloggers are between the ages of 21 to 35. Only about 7 percent of bloggers are over 51. In the world of blogging the young are old hands, the old are newbies.

At the BlogHer conference there were more than 2,400 women bloggers and certainly the under-50 demo outnumbered the over-50. And over 60, like me.

It could be worse, I guess. They might have called us “geezer geeks.”

I asked Beth Blakely from the website Vibrant Nation, which is for women age 50 and over and has a number of regular bloggers ,what she thinks of the term. Beth says it can be helpful to identify a blogger by her subject just as you would any writer with a particular focus. But the general tag of elder blogger doesn’t work for her.

My friend and contemporary Michele blogs about food and wine and some might call her a foodie blogger. But elder blogger? Never. She colors her hair egglplant and hula dances. I can’t imagine she will ever be an elder anything.

The problem is the word. In some cultures “elder” is a sign of respect, as it was once in our own and might some day be again. But in our mainstream youth-happy world it creaks.

I will embrace my gray hair, my funky sore back and that I know most Beatles lyrics. But elder is a description I am not ready or brave enough to own. It makes me feel old. Blogging makes me feel like a player.

Pattie Heiser has the website 50 Fabulous and doesn’t consider herself an elder blogger. “It gives me hives to think of it.” She has the same problem with the word. “Our culture does not revere our elderly and to be so means that you will be disregarded and discarded.”

On the other side, Joan Price is fine with elder. Joan writes books about sex after 60 and blogs about it at NakedAtOurAge.com In her mid-60s, Joan calls herself a senior and considers her audience boomers, seniors and, yes, elders. She credits her late husband with putting the right spin on elder, as someone who had “the wisdom of a lifetime of experiences.”

Were elder to deliver such a strong, respectful vibe it would be something to aspire to. It would be a designation that you earned, not something automatically granted when you become a certain age, like Medicare and movie discounts.

Then, if someone called me an elder, meaning that I was experienced, wise and worldly, I would flaunt it like a new Pashmina.

But elder as in elder blogger? No, in the blogging world I’m pretty much a juvenile.

The blogger from Afghanistan, hair covered in a plain dark Muslim scarf, asked that no one take her photograph. As did the blogger from Bahrain who appeared in skinny jeans and attitude. Their words appear regularly on the internet, for all the world to see. But not their faces.

The two were part of a group of international activists honored by BlogHer, a community of women bloggers who fill the internet with their thoughts on everything from becoming an entrepreneur to surviving teenagers. More than 2400 women bloggers assembled last week in New York but the outspoken activists were the most impressive. These are not women who can twiddle on their laptops in the kitchen when inspiration strikes. They live in places where opinions are illegal. Before they hit the post button they look over their shoulders. Some of them live where “people are raped and killed just for their faith,” said the woman from Bahrain.

I was in New York to find out more about this new media. I’m old media, a long time print journalist and a real baby in the blogging world. Make that even a skeptic, until now. Like many, I’ve been resistant to adding some stranger’s journaling to my pile of reading material and found it easy to dismiss much of the blogosphere as bloated with self indulgent silliness and malicious unfound gossip.

But there are articulate, smart, necessary voices out there too which can make you finally appreciate what an inclusive, essential tool this blogging stuff can be. Even a life support.

I found women who openly share the terrors of post partum depression and crack each other up with shared humor about their disabilities. But the brave activists, especially those who live where ideas and women are routinely silenced, are the real heroines of the blogging world.

Freshta Basij-Rasikh writes for a site called the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

In New York she softly read from her poem “My Red Eyes.” Blood, she said, has replaced the tears she cries for her country. “Cry for your land which is like a ball that everyone kicks, that everyone plays with,” she wrote. “Cry for the country which has rich mineral deposits but great poverty…Cry for its war which won’t stop.”

Esra’a Al Shafei, from Bahrain, blogs for Mideast Youth which links the voices of young people who live in places where she says, “If you don’t have a history of killing someone you are probably planning on killing someone.”

She and others on her site use all the latest techy stuff combined with video, cartoons and plain good writing. Esra was threatened along with her family after appearing on Al Jazeera TV in a rally for an imprisoned blogger who called the president of Egypt a dictator. She said her goal is “to piss off as many dictators as possible.”

Dushi Pillai, a journalist from Sri Lanka in silk yellow tunic and pants, showed us her photo essay for the webste, Humanity Ashore, of a prosthetics factory where war victims go to be fitted for new hands and feet to replace what was ripped from their bodies by land mines.

Marie Trigona writes out of Buenos Aires for Mujeres Libres. One of her goals is to remind the world of the brutal purge of political enemies that happened 30 years ago in South America which she does by telling the stories of tens of thousands tortured and killed by the military and police.

People were killed back then for daring to advocate for fairness and justice, just like these digital dissidents are doing today. The internet brings us their stories. And visa versa. It’s like what Freshta from Afghanistan said about the internet. “You are my eyes. Without you I can’t see the world.”

The couple from Massachusetts waiting outside the Orangerie in the warm, green Tuileries Garden agreed it was a relief to be away from disasters. You could walk around Paris, said the woman, and almost think the world was fine. The restaurants had lots of business and the tiny sidewalk tables were full of coffee drinkers in the morning and wine drinkers the rest of the day. There were lines at the artisan gelato shop until 11 p.m. People even smoked cigarettes and sat in the sun like nothing bad would ever get them.

Except for the cigarettes, we joined in. That’s what happens on a vacation. You get to leave reality behind for a while.

And yet, there really is no full escape, as the French reminded us. A squat guy in a black T-shirt came up to us at the metro and asked if we were Americans. When we said yes, he said, “I’m worried about your fish.”

We had some sense of what was going on back home, getting an occasional glimpse of the news when we checked our email. Obama was getting clobbered by both sides. Tipper and Al separated. The worst was seeing the photo of that noble but doomed oil-soaked pelican on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.

Taking a news break was kind of like going to a film noir, leaving your seat to go get some Milk Duds and coming back to more death and disaster.

We did avoid TV except for joining the crowd in front of a giant screen full of tennis, set up in the square at the Hotel de Ville.

Then it was back to “pass the pate” and one more carafe of the vin rouge.

From the top of one castle or another throughout France you can see fairy tale panoramas of perfect little villages, soft winding rivers and fields of red poppies. They look like make-believe scenes you might set up around a train set.

The rich and powerful built their castles up high, said my husband, so they could throw rocks on the people coming after what they had. Castlenaud, a medieval fortress hugging the cliffs in the Dordogne River valley, is now a museum dedicated to the art of war in the middle ages. This is how people used to kill each other, with crossbows and cannon balls that blew huge holes into the enemy’s castle across the river. It was mean stuff but what those boys played with seem like slingshots compared to our modern war arts where we can take out whole villages by an airborne robot.

If we’d wanted reports on the latest body count in the current bloody conflicts there was a TV in the kitchen at our inn in the Dordogne where Madame Chantel in fiery red hair and orange robe assembled breakfast. But we were content to simply listen to the river running past her gardens. It’s called the Ceou which means “sky in the water” in Occitan, the old language of southern France.

One night we sat beside it with our innkeepers, who speak as little English as we do French, and discussed our oil spill. Jean Luc got out a U.S. map so we could show him the Gulf of Mexico and where the poisonous ribbon of oil was fouling the waters from Texas to Florida and Lord knows where else. He traced around Florida and pointed up the Atlantic coastline and we all shrugged helplessly.

At Dallas we got through customs, found our gate to take us to San Francisco and were greeted by the urgent face of Wolf Blitzer on a TV screen. Not quite ready for prime time, we turned the other way and went looking for a banana smoothie.