Australian Blogging Conference was a Hit

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I’ve finally got around to doing some personal blogging today, the travel of September and the long weekend behind me, and I just wanted to do a short post congratulating Peter Black on hosting a great conference in Brisbane.

It was hard to work out numbers, maybe 100-150 people turned up to QUT Kelvin Grove for the conference, a thoroughly modern venue which someone said to me was too post-modernist…I liked it.

The sessions were great. I was on stage with Professor John Quiggley and Senator Andrew Bartlett for the opening discussion…on one hand I felt overwhelmed to be on stage with two men with such great backgrounds, yet on the other hand it was a great platform to preach blogging inclusiveness from, and get straight to the point, and as one of the few professional bloggers at the conference I had a different take…which I hope was good 🙂

I spent the next period at the legal session: EFA is still going, which is a surprise for me, given their low to non-existent profile, but it is sort of nice knowing that they are still there. Some interesting feedback on legal exposure for Australian bloggers; they claim I can still be sued in Australia even though I host everything in the US. It’s a worry, but I’m still hosting everything in the States, if I suspect it’s a big risk I’ll set up a US shelf company to own the sites.

In the afternoon I led The Building a Better Blog session and I roped in Yaro Starak to help. Personable bloke who speaks well and is a credit to his industry. After that I sat in on Des Walsh and Yaro for the Business Blogging session. Again, interesting stuff, different perspectives on things which I found personally interesting.

Best thing about the conference all up was the face to face conversations and feedback: as a networking session alone it kicked ass, but I’d like to think that at least some of those in attendance learnt stuff as well.

My only negative was the split into the various sessions; I would have liked to sit in on more of them but the concurrent format made that impossible. Maybe the trick is to do shorter sessions, or hold less at the same time.

According to Peter the next conference will be held in Sydney or Melbourne next year, which I’d suggest would mean a bigger audience and more possibilities. Where ever it is I’ll be back for more; brining Australian bloggers together in the great Dave Winer style unconference format is a worthwhile thing.