State-of-play: Blogging and podcasting in Australia today

Other areas where blogging has not received the same sort of attention it is getting in the USA is through conferences and books. Conferences and books dedicated to blogging are becoming a feature of the American landscape but they are still rare in Australia.

A blogging conference scheduled for Melbourne in February this year had to be cancelled, partly through lack of sponsorship interest. Another, Blogtalk Downunder, is scheduled for Sydney in May. It has attracted support from at least one commercial sponsor, iBurst, and is also backed by a number of higher education institutions. So hopefully it has a good chance of success. The Walkley Foundation is also including a session on blogging in its freelance writers’ conference scheduled for May 1 in Sydney.

Unlike their US counterparts, Australian book publishers generally seem to believe that people who write blogs don’t read books (or so they tell me). A book about blogging, tentatively titled Uses of Blogs, and written primarily by Australian contributors (including me), has recently been given the go-ahead by a New York publisher. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before some Australian publishers catch-up.

2004 was hailed as the year of the blog in the USA. Partly this was the product of the presidential election which saw online media play an unprecedented role in all aspects of campaigning from fund-raising to reportage to fierce debate.

Australia’s year of the blog is likely to come in either 2006 or 2007, driven by a faster broadband rollout, the coverage of blogs out of the USA and the desire of more citizens to participate in politics, as individuals, in the run-up to the next federal election.