Yesterday I attended the Australian Blogging Conference held at QUT Kelvin Grove Campus.
Overall I thought it was good and congrats to Peter Black for organising it. The conference covered a number of areas including blogging in politics, legal issues, corporate blogging and the future of blogging.
For me the day was a great opportunity to get away from my desk and lappy. Being a technical, geeky person, I have only attended “technical conferences” before like Tech.Ed etc. The conference was a little different as you had a big variety of people..journalists, technical geeks, lawyers, politicians, people who get paid to blog etc.
The welcome intro was quite interesting as it had a professional blogger, a uni professor and a federal politican talking about blogging. Some of my highlights were:
- 1/2 way through the Senator said “this is all off the record right?” followed quickly by a large number of keypresses on lappies round the room.
- Discussion around the use of blogging/Facebook etc in politics and the differences between Australia and United States.
Next up i went to the Legal issues of Blogging session. This session dealt heavily on copywrite and the differences in the law between the US and Australia. It discussed a few cases such as first Video Recorder, Kazar etc. There was a little bit of conversation around defamation and the issue of people asking you to remove content from your site. It touched on things such as Google search caches etc. which would have been an interesting topic to discuss further.
After lunch i attended the Business and Corporate Blogging session. It had some great discussion about should ceo’s blog, blogging policy, measuring roi, building a brand/profile. The session had some great stories of how companies are using their blogs to market themselves.
One of the questions about should you mix personal and business in your blog made me think a lot about our blog. This is a question we asked ourselves when we created the blog. For anyone who reads our blog, you’ll know we chose to combine the two. As we are a small business with clients around the country and world that we sometimes never see or quite often rarely see I think adding personal posts makes us more real to some of our customers. I don’t think it hurts us at all for them to see we spent some time riding an elephant or doing some sight seeing in a new town. In a way, it fills in some conversation that they miss out on by us working virtually, rather than sitting on-site in their office everyday. It also gives potential clients a way to get to know us before they meet us.
Lunchtime i met a uni professor who gives students marks for blogging…man if only i could have done that in my course….He would give them a topic to blog about that he touched on or didn’t talk about at all in the lectures and also made them do their own entries. Sounds like a great way to get them to do some research/learning and get some marks at the same time.
The last session I attended Building a Better Blog had some tips of how to get more traffic to your blog.
It was great to attend a conference that makes you think about your work/site/blog in a different way. I guess our blog isn’t particulary focused..it’s a bit more of random tips, info, updates etc. Generally I do most of my posts on things that i’ve gotten stuck on so next time i can find the solution faster.