Tag Archives: Blogging

Blogging the 2016 Australian Historical Association Conference

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A mural on yellow background with red woman and black hair holding a yellow 7 pointed star. Ballarat with large black letters and "The past is history" in red underneath.

The History Council of Victoria tweeted: “New mural in Ballarat – ‘The past is history’ – a farewell message for #OzHA2016 perhaps? Thx for a good conference!”

Social media has transformed conferences. No longer are conferences a private experience which might be shared months or years later when some papers are published. Live reporting of conferences on Twitter has gone a long way to enlarging the audience of a conference to interested people around the world. Where conference attendees are particularly engaged on Twitter the conversation on the back channel can add another dimension to the discussion in the conference venue.

Yet, as I noted in my last post about the Twitter stream from the recent conference of the Australian Historical Association, the immediate and abbreviated nature of the tweet severely limits the depth of reporting through that platform. Twitter also uses an abbreviated form of language that can be tricky for the uninitiated to understand. Longer-form reporting in the form of blog posts is indispensable for the comprehensive coverage of the conference.

Good blogging is not easy and it is particularly difficult to do during a conference. Ideally a blogger will attend sessions during the day, then in the evening write an accurate and fair post ready to publish before the start of sessions the next day. It is not easy. I have blogged several conferences and usually finish writing some time after midnight. By the end of a week-long conference a blogger will be quite sleep deprived. Usually I book an extra night in my accommodation and spend the next day reading in bed to recover.

We were fortunate that the highly regarded history blogger, Janine Rizzetti attended the Australian Historical Association conference in Ballarat. Rizzetti has been blogging at The Resident Judge of Port Phillip for eight years. She has been a prolific blogger throughout her PhD (she is now Dr Rizzetti) and has blogged several conferences including the 2013 Australian Historical Association conference in Wollongong. Continue reading →

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National Book Bloggers Forum

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six books

Participants at the National Book Bloggers Forum received a pile of Random House/Penguin books.

This week Random House and Penguin organised a National Book Bloggers Forum in Sydney. Held in the week of the Sydney Writers Festival, staff from the largest publishing house in the world mixed with over thirty book bloggers for a day of book talk. I was fortunate to be one of the bloggers who attended the Forum.

Bloggers are writers and they are writers who know how to engage their audience.  Random House recognises this said the publisher’s Managing Editor, Brett VanOver. Random House regards bloggers as having the kind of potential that would make them authors of books people want to read.

VanOver pointed out that the days of publishers nurturing authors while they hone their writing skills through several books are gone. Now publishers need writers to be fully formed by the time they publish their first book. Publishers regard blogging as a process where budding authors can develop their skills. Through blogging writers develop a confident voice VanOver observed. Bloggers are already published authors, they already write on a theme. The challenge that VanOver identified is that bloggers have to move from a personal perspective to a universal one if they are to have a book published. Continue reading →