Reflections on a Missed Blogging Conference in Sydney

In the past couple of weeks people I know who live in Sydney and who

know of my interest in blogging, but aren’t themselves bloggers, 

have been asking me about the ‘big conference’ on blogging held there a

week or two ago. They heard people being interviewed about it on the

radio, they said.

This was driving me a bit batty - how could a ‘ big conference’ on

blogging in Sydney have snuck up and happened without my picking up a

sniff of it beforehand? And what had I missed out on? After all, the

airfares to Sydney from where I am are currently so cheap that I could

easily have managed to get there if I’d known.

I did a perfunctory and unproductive search on the excellent website of

the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our national broadcaster (’the

ABC‘). Oh well, maybe the

conference was not that big after all. And somewhere in the back of my

brain a small voice was telling me there had been some indication of an

academic conference on blogging coming up.

Still wondering.

Then today at a regular Sunday brunch with a few friends, there were

some visitors from Sydney: “so what do you do…?” “well, do you know

about blogging?” “oh yes, there was a big conference on that in Sydney

a couple of weeks ago”. Did he know who had run it, any details? No.

So I did a more serious search, like <blogging conference Sydney> - d’uh - and there it was: Blogtalk Downunder

. I checked out the site and found that it had been what I would call

an academic conference - from the titles of the papers and mentions of

presenters and attendees, it was about the ‘phenomenon’ of blogging.

Not much sign of any reference to business, although there were some invited speakers  with great blogosphere credentials who I am sure know a lot about the ‘business blogging’ issues - for example, Rebecca Blood, who has an interesting checklist on MSN Spaces - Blogging 101: subtitled ‘10 tips to set you ahead of the pack, starting with your first post’.

The conference may well have been interesting, and there are certainly

some interesting links from the conference site, but I think it was

probably a bit wide of what I’m mainly interested in, i.e. blogging for

business.

What I am pleased about is that more people are becoming aware of

blogging, which smooths the path for me and others who are on a mission

to promote blogging as something for business people to take a serious

look at.